What I'd like to talk about when I talk about biennales

I don't even remember writing this essay, which gives a pretty good indication of where my head was at by the end of 2009. I do remember it being published though (in Broadsheet, volume 39, number 1, March 2010), because on reading it I realised that in my eagerness to come up with a critical framework for evaluating biennales, I managed to completely depoliticise WHW's 2009 Istanbul Biennale, which was, of course, completely political.

Let’s get this out of the way early — there is only one aspect of biennales that matters, and that is their capacity to ask what art is, what it can be and what it can do. If criticism, which has for so long struggled to exercise its authority on biennales, can have any recourse to its founding responsibility of passing judgment — as distinct from, say, issuing the standard complaints about scale, elitism and locality-branding — surely judgment can only be passed on how well, in the first instance, biennales perform this triadic, propositional function, as a methodological prelude to grappling with the propositions themselves.

This is my attempt to have done with the biennale debate, my concession to that conceit of modernist criticism that exceeds even the idea that through expertise, connoisseurship and social standing one possesses the authority to pass judgment, and that is to have the last word. And yet a combination of personal insecurity, persistent suspicions about the currency of art criticism — and, indeed, of art, more of which shortly — and professional experience of the biennale form’s ability to reinvent itself lead me to the understanding that there will be no last word on anything, at least until the ice caps melt or some future dystopian state bans art criticism for its sheer uselessness. Failing that, I have resolved to limit the frequency of my reflections on biennales to once every two years.

I should also say at this point that the idea that biennales might have some speculative and propositional function with regard to the nature of art is not new. I, for one, first encountered it in Terry Smith’s address to the opening symposium of the 2004 Biennale of Sydney, which argued that biennales had succeeded criticism — now ‘largely promotional’ — in attempting to articulate the state of contemporary art. Smith’s observation was muddied somewhat when, shortly after he made it, biennales demonstrated that they could be as largely promotional as art criticism, a development exemplified by the impact of a peaking art market on the production and reception of the 2007 Grand Tour. Now that things have settled down a little, though, the point stands.

It has, moreover, been beautifully illustrated by What, How & for Whom/WHW’s recent Istanbul Biennale What keeps mankind alive?, whose deft execution and careful contextualisation clearly proposed an empowering and anti-spectacular role for art. WHW eschewed the intellectual and presentational sprawl that has come to typify so much biennale-making to construct instead an organised and accessible platform for a tight, focused selection of work to deliver a vision of art that drew explicitly on Brecht’s notion of education as a process of providing agency.

What keeps mankind alive? was educative in a three closely integrated ways. Firstly, a direct sense, in a manner that Charles Esche later described as ‘art as informative intervention’, offering ‘possibilities for learning [that] ranged across geographies and cultures’ — Sanja Iveković’s report into the status of women in Turkey, for instance, scattered across all the major venues as screwed up balls of paper, unnoticeable apart from their searing red colour; or Marko Peljhan’s eerily clinical installation of documentation relating to the planning and execution of the Srebrenica massacre. But also reflexively, problematising the language of representation, the very medium that offers art its informative possibilities, through the affecting mechanism of personal reflection — Rabih Mroué’s lectures on the role of photography in political propaganda are exemplary here, as is Deimantas Narkevičius’s almost autobiographical interview with Peter Watkins on the ethics of documentary. In contrast to the more standard role of the audience as passive consumers whose reflection on the cultural production is at best evaluative, such insertions offered an appropriately critical standpoint from which to consider the various discursive encounters presented by the biennale, imbuing a final sense of the education as the production of agency.

What was most striking about this, especially for what was widely regarded as such a political biennale — not to mention, rather patronisingly given the geopolitical make-up of the show, as communist nostalgia — was that the exhibition functioned by and large as an exhibition. The project was well crafted, tidily organised, thoughtfully selected and carefully installed according to the broadly accepted standards of exhibition making, even in venues not typically used for the presentation of art. It was as if after forty years of critique, the white cube, with a few slight variations, has proved to be the medium most amenable to publicly speculating on the nature of contemporary art.

Of course, this is not so much of a problem if the Istanbul Biennale is considered in the context of its propositionality. It is one argument among the great many being offered by biennales around the world at what is no longer a startling rate. What distinguishes it is the clarity and effectiveness with which the point was made. From a critical perspective, we can say that because What keeps mankind alive? made its point about contemporary art clearly, it was a good biennale, and here the traditional evaluative function of art criticism — the temerity to ask ‘is this good or bad?’ — can be live a little longer.

It was a good biennale because it respected the intelligence and patience of the viewer — the biennale was broken into three smaller exhibitions at the main venues, each of which, though substantial, was not so vast as to not be experienced in a single visit. It was a good biennale in its approach to constructing its propositions through the judicious selection of individual works without sacrificing the need for the works themselves to be shown in the best possible light, which is to say, the need for the works to maintain a margin of their autonomy within the overall conception of the biennale. Here again, the biennale is no major departure from regular exhibitions. And it was a good biennale because it was even handed, its curators resisting the urge to apportion disproportionate space, resources and attention to ‘show-stopping’ works at the expense of others; this was a boon not only to the consistency of the exhibitions in an experiential sense, but also, one imagines, to the artists in an ethical sense.

The need for ethics of exhibition-making of compelling relevance to biennale-making is an important point to raise here as it functions as another perspective from which to determine the success or otherwise of such projects. One framework for thinking through such an ethics has been offered by Raqs Media Collective, hinging on the notion of curatorial responsibility, who ask: ‘What does it mean to undertake to bear the burden of work of representation of our ideas and concepts in and through the bodies and bodies of work of people other than ourselves?’ What responsibility does a curator hold, in other words, to those whose productive capacities they mobilise in their service, or in and possibly against the service of forces to which they themselves are subject, which is to say, in the exercise of their critical agency?

We should, by now, be familiar with the notion of the curator as a critical agent, or at least that of the figure of the curator who, at the historical nexus of a complex of power relations, has lately found itself possessed of an agency that like all agency has the potential be exercised critically. Without this agency there would in fact be no such thing as a curator; rather, there would be an amalgam of social forces going by the name of curator. Each iteration of that word, curator, would be entirely contextually determinant, relying for precise interpretation on the particular manifestation of those forces at any given moment in the performative exchange between speaker and listener. This is not to say, however, that the meaning produced in this exchange would be discontinuous, any more than the social forces at work in its construction would be discontinuous; nor would the curator radically indeterminate. The curator would emblematically reliant on the context that produced it, and subject to shifts in that context. Critical agency, the capacity to think and feel, to form opinions and to act on them, is what provides the figure of the curator with its continuity, and is thus a vital element in considering what curators produce — exhibitions, biennales and so on — in relation to the forces and imperatives that would seek to determine them and in whose service they often act. It is here that those generic aspects of biennales criticised to the point of cliché — locality branding, gentrification and cultural diplomacy — have their relevance, but only in negative relation to the precise and particular manner in which the curator’s agency is exercised against them.

What Raqs, for their part, in effect propose is the responsible exercise the agency at the disposal of the curator — curatorial responsibility — in the simplest of terms, and that is the production an exhibition ‘that can look good and think acutely’, which can in this thinking offer ‘a sustained productive contemplation, not just the curation of experiments and experience, but also the curation of reflection, a practice that dares to be theory and which must be held to account if it fails to be theory’. Taking aim at ‘shoddily mounted exhibitions prefaced by badly written, lengthy theoretical discourses’, they add that this thinking must be sophisticated enough to ‘withstand ruthless interrogation, at least at the hands of the artworks that constitute the exhibition itself’. An exhibition or a biennale must say what it does, do what it says, and do both to the best of its ability if it has any respect to those who produce its content and to those who constitute its public. In relation to the criteria for the judgment of biennales established at the outset of this essay, then, we might say that in order to be properly propositional, that is, to ask what art is, what it can be and what it can do, and to do so incisively, a biennale must in the first instance be responsible, but that at the same time, if responsibility entails a daring to become theory, then propositionality will always be what is produced.

What, then, have we learnt of art from the thousands of biennales that have taken place over the past two decades, and where might this knowledge lead us? I want to close this essay not by attempting answer that question, but by constructing a possible framework in which it might be considered, a framework that is, appropriately enough, an admixture of the work of others.

We have to note that the expansion of the notion of contemporary art that has taken place alongside and through the emergence of the biennale-form as the critical register of contemporary art — at least at a mediatic level — has, for all its challenges to Euro-American cultural hegemony, nevertheless occurred under the sign of a contemporary art that remains disturbingly closely calibrated to that of Western art. Contemporaneity has yet to divest itself of the expansionist and exoticising logics of modernity, engendering an orthodoxy according to which, to quote a recent text by Omnia El Shakry, ‘only non-Western art is expected to have questions of identity as a touchstone’. More provocatively, El Shakry adds that ‘art reduced to the status of geo-political identity politics is evacuated of all meaning’. Speaking on a panel during the opening week of the Istanbul Biennale, Bassam El Baroni observed that the practice of representing identity, initially deployed as a defence against the homogenising effects of globalisation, is inadequate to the task on account identity’s fragility, its tendency to fragment under the monolithic weight of capital (leaving behind, we would have to assume, the hollowed out image of its own otherness). Against this ‘aesthetics of identity’, El Baroni proposed a ‘logic of assemblage’. The oddly avant-gardist tone of this proposition echoes a surprising point made by Paolo Virno in a recent interview published in the journal Open. In response to a question about the importance of art to political movements, Virno offered the following: ‘… the most important effect of art is set in the formal sphere. In that sense, even art that is remote from political engagement touches upon the social and political reality … It demonstrates the inadequacy of the old standards and suggests, in the formal sphere and through the formal work of poetry, new standards for the appraisal of our cognitive and affective experience.’

In cobbling together these important observations, I don’t want to suggest that the best thing we can learn from the biennales of the past two decades, responsible and irresponsible, propositional and otherwise, is that the best course for art is an escape from representation or from political engagement, that the most ethical position is one of hermeticism and disengagement, of effectively disavowing agency. Nor — should there be any misunderstanding — do any of the artists or theorists to whom I have just referred. But I do feel that if a biennale, or any other exhibition for that matter, is to exploit effectively the integral relationship between responsibility and propositionality, it will ask fundamental questions of art and aesthetics. These questions, if they are to be taken up by curators, need only be modest — probably should only be modest — but they should be properly artistic questions — what art is, what art can be, what art can do. Then criticism, once it is finished with its evaluations, will have something it can really engage with.

The Set-up: Performative performance in ten uneasy stages

'The Set-up' was a catalogue essay of sorts for an exhibition that didn't know whether it was a group show or three solo shows - all of which were terrific - by Justene Williams, Meiro Koizumi and Damiano Bertoli. I suppose it would have been a group show if I'd had more money and space, but then again it simply could have been five solo shows. It was first published in Column 8 (2011, pp. 61-6). The title was swiped from here:

Stage one

The monosyllabic English word ‘stage’ is surprisingly rich in connotative possibilities. Its allusions to dynamism and stasis are so co-reliant that it might be described as emblematically dialectical. As a noun it exudes both temporality and spatiality. Along with the tragic sense of the passage of time, it suggests a contiguous phase constituted by acts whose unity is determined by their usefulness in achieving a given telos (we speak of a ‘first stage’, a ‘next stage’ and so on), while also implying that completion of such a phase will permit rest, indeed naming that rest (where we ‘reach the next stage’). In spatial terms it refers to a provisional separation that conventionally demarcates an area as specifically restricted to performance and its accoutrements, which by an inverse logic also defines those within its boundaries as performers. That a performance might be described, in a temporal sense, as a complex of acts within a given period of time, suggests that what takes place on a stage is itself a stage, and at a further remove the corralling of bodies that would normally be in free movement into, if not rest, then at least a restricted space for movement. Further — that this stage is a stage in an obscure sequence, to whose end each iteration, each staging and restaging will strive, even against its better nature.

Stage two

Theatre has retained the word ‘proscenium’ from the Greco-Roman era to describe specific structures that replicate the predominant spectator/performer relationship of that time. A proscenium theatre is one in which the audience faces the stage directly, generally — though not exclusively — viewing the action through a framework known as a proscenium arch, the window that implies the presence of a ‘fourth wall’. In Latin, however, it simply means ‘in front of the scenery’, denoting the stage as such. Modern French has translated the term literally, rendering it as avant-scène, but shifts its emphasis to refer specifically to the apron, the part of the stage that places the performers in front of the proscenium arch, in front of the curtain, dangerously in the littoral space between performer and audience, leaving one or both dangerously exposed. Julian Beck situated his Living Theatre directly in this space. We see it parodied to a certain extreme in the notorious 'Be Black, Baby' sequence from Brian De Palma’s Hi, Mom!, where the stage is defined purely in temporal terms, a bourgeois audience allowing itself to be brutalised in the most appalling fashion by an experimental theatre troupe, then applauding them at the completion of the performance (‘Great show, great theatre’ … ‘I’m tickled I came’ … ‘Clive Barnes was right!’). There is no such humorous let-off in Hideo Nakata’s Ring: the piercing of the fourth wall of the television screen comes with the traumatic realisation that as performers, we have foregone the agency of our spectatorship. At least De Palma allowed us room for disinterested critical judgment, no matter how much he lampooned it; the most terrifying aspect of the electromagnetic avenging kaidan Sadako is that she precludes any such possibility.

Stage three

Chieko! Toshio Anazawa’s Ki-43-IIIa fighter took off from Chiran airfield on the morning 12 April 1945, carrying 250 kg of explosives. It plummeted into an American destroyer off Okinawa shortly after. ‘Chieko’, read a letter that his lover received four days later, ‘I want to see you … I want to talk to you … honestly’. Chieko! A photograph of a group of schoolgirls waving goodbye to Anazawa was circulated as propaganda before Japan’s war came to a horrific halt that August. Chieko! His letter formed the basis of a wildly popular but deeply ambiguous manga by Koji Seo, whose publication in 2007 coincided with a problematic revival of the figure of the kamikaze as part of the founding mythology of post-war Japan. Chieko! In 2010, artist Meiro Koizumi, having sought to deconstruct the ongoing romance of this figure over a series of videos and performances, adopted the form of Anazawa’s ghost as he made the final steps of a sixty-five-year stagger home, traversing some of Tokyo’s most iconic locations, not to Ikebukuro station where the pilot last saw his love, but to Yasukuni shrine, where his soul had been interred along with that of 2,466,000 other war dead, among them fourteen Class A war criminals. Chieko! In Ginza, passers-by stopped to ask if the hideous figure was alright as he lurched forward, stumbling, clutching the side of his face as if to keep his jaw from swinging off. Chieko! In Shibuya they ignored him, even when his agonised gait left him stranded in the middle of Hachiko Crossing as the lights turned green. Chieko! Koizumi later recounts how the pedestrians knew exactly what he was doing, how they did not judge. Chieko! His disappearance beneath Yasukuni’s imposing stone torii was documented from afar by a static camera shot along with the distorted recording of his voice and those of the shrine officials and right wing thugs forced to deal with him. Chieko! Fade to black.

Stage four

When performance, presented to one public in one public space, is documented and presented to another public in another public space, where is the art? According to one line of argument in recent theory, what is encountered in galleries these days is often not so much art as documentation — the art has already taken place, and has taken place elsewhere. But what of performance that is performed in order to be documented and presented in a gallery? Or when there is no primary register as such, when performance, documentation and presentation cannot be isolated as priorities within an artist’s methodology? In documentation, a first public can themselves be documented, their interaction with the performer drawing them into the work. In a perverse and terrifying inversion of Sadako’s traumatic annulment of the fourth wall, the line between spectator and performer is dissolved to find the first public on the other side of the screen. Trapped in a looped sequence of temporalities, they are subject to the gaze of the second public. All they can assert is their chronological precedence as a public, an outdated, unfashionable claim to originality, perhaps, but entirely keeping with the touristic logic of the vernissage, where one allows oneself — no, forces oneself — to be seen to see, to be seen to be the first to see. We know where our publics are, then, but where is that art? There is only a sequence: set-up, performance, set-up, performance. Can installation perform? In the sense that it is performative, yes. It is a rhetorical gesture, a temporary structure that takes on meaning only within the less temporary structure in which it is presented, which is to say the gallery space, the site it points away from but according to which it is always defined. Set-up, performance, set-up, performance. The doubling here is specular, queering the membrane between spectator and performer on both sides of the screen.

Stage five

To stage: Desire caught by the tale was a play written by Pablo Picasso during an idle moment in occupied Paris, eliciting Gertrude Stein’s famous advice that the painter stick to his day job. Indeed, it was staged by its author precisely once, three years after its completion, as a private reading in the apartment of Louis and Michel Leiris, with a rather extraordinary cast that included the Batailles, the de Beauvoir-Sartres, Georges Braque, Albert Camus, Jacques Lacan, Henri Michaux and Raymond Queneau, complete with a two-metre swastika swiped from the entry to the Louvre by none other than Samuel Beckett. The work is so self-consciously absurdist, so purposefully difficult, in a theatrical sense, that is has seen few revivals (although its proponents have been notable, among them Dylan Thomas, Lynda Benglis and Julian Beck himself). No staging has been so celebrated as the work’s first full-scale production by the radical raconteur Jean-Jacques Lebel in 1967, whose own cast may have been lesser-known than Picasso’s but no less intriguing, featuring nouvelle vague actor/director László Szabó and Warhol fixtures Taylor Meade and Ultra Violet (Meade would later direct the Benglis production). It is, in short, an art-historical oddity, capable of attracting luminaries from across disciplines but remaining utterly anonymous.

Stage six

To restage: Continuous Moment: Anxiety Villa draws on the Picasso and Lebel versions of Desire caught by the tail and collapses them into the aesthetico-political universe we know as Damiano Bertoli. Bertoli has created an installation out of a play and previous stagings of the play in their own theres and thens, restaging it and them for his here and now, restaged in the Bertolian universe of Superstudio collage aesthetics — Cartesian grids; disjunctures of perspective, light, colour and texture; dialectics of figure and ground, of presentation and representation, of yearnings for pre-representational presence; tails by which to catch desire; pretty girls — collage being at once more violent and reflexive than montage, its severed edges and brutal tonal shifts announcing itself as collage, never anything less, which is to say, never anything like the seamlessness of the image, that slick negotiator of spectacular social relations. To stage, to restage: staging as spatiotemporal performance (there can be no stage without other stages). To stage, weirdly transcendent in the agency this gesture asserts over space and time, at least insofar as a given space and time is defined as the stage on which to stage. In this ahistorical act of historical retrieval, the artist might slow what once was moving down to complete inertia. But this inertia is the bearer of a terrible momentum just waiting to be released, shivering between collapse and explosion, a romantic, wholly problematic absurd sucked into a black hole only to be spewed back somewhere else in space and time.

Stage seven

All of history all at once! Here is our ghost—speak to it, Horatio! ‘Chieko!’ is all it can muster in response. But then history never appears as just one ghost. Just as there is more than one communism, our spectres are always multiple (by how much do the dead outnumber the living?). Should we be so bold as to articulate our relationship to history along the lines of the proscenium structure, and even bolder as to complicate that relationship by introducing the screen, many screens, it would look something like Justene Williams’ Hot Air Hillbilly Weekend Workshop, a barrage of screens unravelling time not in sequence but in simultaneity. In Williams’ work, the performance never was. Any notion of originality, of the smooth and regular passage of time is carved up, looped mouth to tail and strung together sideways, like a ball of string presented in section, ruffled a bit for effect. Elaborate costumes, props and sets are created, activated, recorded and destroyed, all except a ragtag bunch of chairs, rigged to infantilise their sitters with torches shining up though holes cut for ablutions — to perch on one while watching the bank of monitors aggressively looping snippets of Williams’ non-performance is to participate in the crazy spectacle as some kind of demented pre-schooler. The room is a haphazard grid of fluorescent yellow punctuated with blue and pink, like a drunken antipodean flirtation with the ghost of Piet Mondrian, while a masked accordionist provides the jaunty soundtrack to a host of weird tasks undertaken by a stout Judge Judy character, a chaotic female authority figure who bosses her way around a set that she seems to have risen out of, the first sign of egocentric life to emerge from the primordial swamp of twentieth-century avant-gardism, genomic Picassos and Lebels no doubt lying somewhere within (but oh, for a history of twentieth-century art containing only women!).

Stage eight

Even the authority of the first public as historical precedent has been annihilated. We experience the gesture all at once. The only difference between audiences is not time, but the gesture’s framework. Are we in the reflexive space of the gallery, or are we so many passengers on a train? When a young man awakes to find himself in theatre’s dreaming on a beautiful afternoon, we see him for the first time whether we are on the train or in the gallery. The same as if instead we were seated near young woman, attempting to comfort him, from another train going in another direction at another time. The privilege of being a gallery viewer is being able to see the two together in imaginary conversation, joined across time and space by apposed projections. This is not a historical authority as much as it is the joy of confluence, of being present to witness the second set-up performing. The players here are not star-crossed lovers like Toshio and Chieko, nor are they sexually assertive archetypes like Picasso and Judge Judy; their tension is that uneasy one between masculine and feminine modes of emotional collapse, or rather, between modes of emotional collapse that might be gendered masculine or feminine, tragic in the sense of the former, hysterical when it comes to the latter. What sex is your nervous breakdown? Hamlet or Ophelia? This is Koizumi’s Theatre Dreams Again of a Beautiful Afternoon, which, as it happens, is only half a remake of an earlier version of the same work, the recurring dream of theatre, with qualifications. One might be tempted to read the work as the coming to consciousness of a character within a vignette — not an actor, a character — that he is nothing more than a fiction, and that this might find its parallels within contemporary life. Surely it is not for nothing that he is a commuter on a train? But the majority of the character’s breakdown occurs off-camera, which is to say off-stage. When he collapses to the ground, he is out of view, he is behind the proscenium arch. He has left the avant-scène, leaving us with nothing but his first public, an audience facing an audience, being seen to see.

Stage nine

Set-up, performance, set-up, performance: to stage, to stage, to re-stage. A mise-en-abyme of mise-en-scène, art becoming documentation becoming art, all of it shuddering inexorably toward some paradoxically receding denouement, like the two sides of a single train speeding in opposite directions. The train never reaches its destination, history appears all at once, and two stages are collapsed to constitute a third stage. Performance here depends not on its immediacy but on its mediation. In a sense, there can only be representation, whether it occurs in the street, on a train, in an apartment, a theatre, a gallery or a chaotic cardboard video set. Is pre-representational purity ever possible? Can mediation not find its own immediacy? To be immediate necessarily implies occurring without mediation, but there is no requirement that mediation itself cannot occur without mediation. Nor does it preclude performance itself from being mediated performatively. In another sense, immediacy means to happen at once, and in this sense there is no temporal difference between the melodrama that unfolds on the train and the melodrama that unfolds on the screen. Indeed, the reduction of a performance to a plurality of instances occurring at once is arguably more immediate than its ‘pure’ unmediated duration. In performance, time is shared between performers and spectators. But there are, effectively, two times to which installation has access: that of its performers and that of its spectators. What is most provocative about this is that the performative stage can never be reduced to pure temporality. The organisation of space assumes a real centrality. This perhaps is the strongest contribution of such work to the symbolic field, in a general sense. Set-up, peformance, set-up, performance; in the avant-scène, before the proscenium, in the staging of every action, the uncertain ground shared by performers and spectactors, by their agencies, which in themselves are at once in conflict and in common, the organisation of space is paramount. Such is the lot of art at this moment in history, telling us what capitalism already knows.

Stage ten

Chieko! Fade to black.

Person showing his penis: A test case in knowledge production

This essay is from Broadsheet volume something, number something something, probably 2009 sometime. The lateral leaps in this one are pretty funny, but I stand by what I said about Burn after reading. It was written in one go at the kitchen table.

According to the Coen Brothers farce Burn after reading, the real agents of history are not the intelligence and security apparatuses of Western society as one might expect, but rather its plastic surgeons and divorce lawyers. Their role, in fact, recalls that of the assistants or Gehilfen who appear again and again in Kafka’s novels, representatives — advocates — of some unfathomable force, whose sole narrative purpose seems to be to guide protagonists from one situation to the next, but in such a way that any knowledge they impart will be inconclusive. Indeed ‘they have no knowledge’, as Agamben has noted, ‘no skills, and no “equipment”’; they are, quoting Benjamin, ‘“crepuscular”’, ‘incomplete’. When, at the end of the film, a senior CIA staffer asks his assistant, ‘What did we learn, Palmer?’, he receives the answer ‘I don’t know sir’, and concludes ‘I don’t fucking know either’, adding ‘I guess we learned never to do it again’, and, after a pause, ‘I’m fucked if I know what we did.’

This scene was the first thing that came to mind in conversations immediately following Santiago Sierra’s intervention into One Day Sculpture, the cluster of temporary public art projects that unfolded across New Zealand in the latter part of 2008 and into 2009. Art audiences have lately assumed a certain agency in the sense that the weight of expectation itself will place impetus on a given artistic project to deliver, as Jan Verwoert quite ebulliently pointed out at an accompanying symposium held the very morning Sierra’s project was itself delivered. Our collective expectation is the insurance policy against which we are guaranteed delivery of what we desire, and what we desire, according to Verwoert, is always the phallus. Should we not receive the phallus, our ‘dick in a box’ as he put it, we feel entitled to be critical. But what happens to criticality when this process is short circuited, when the facilitator of the exchange turns out to be a Gehilfe, when we’re fucked if we know what we got? Not the modest gesture Roman Ondak had provided Wellington a day earlier by piling small mounds of sawdust around the city’s wooden Old Government House, the gesture Verwoert happened to be coming to terms with, but something else entirely?

For what Sierra did deliver was Verwoert’s dick in a box, but not his phallus. The box was a rather tatty empty office at the top of a narrow flight of stairs on Wellington’s Dixon Street. Symposium delegates, eager to see Sierra’s pirate one day sculpture — competing, against the rules, as it was, with Billy Apple’s one-man campaign to have the wax removed from a nearby Henry Moore — were lined up at a doorway, into which young artist and project ‘producer’ Reuben Moss was allowing one person at a time. ‘Where are we?’ asked a colleague I’d arrived with, who was standing in front of me in the line, ‘I mean, what was this place before?’ ‘I don't know … an architect’s office maybe?’ Moss replied, evidently entirely comfortable in his role as unforthcoming Gehilfe — and so much for site specificity. Once inside the office, we were initially confronted with an old bulletin board punctured with a few odd pushpins; only on suspecting an Ondakian anti-climax — or perhaps that, like another Ondak performed throughout the city, the line itself was the work — and turning to leave did we encounter a sad looking man with his head hanging down and his flaccid member protruding from his fly at the mercy of the dry Wellingtonian air. I say we but I’m talking about me. In any case, I didn’t get the phallus, but I did get the joke.

But what ultimately was delivered? Was it what we, I, expected? The oscillation between collective and personal pronouns here comes naturally, because though individuated, so much of the work was experienced collectively — such is the peculiar duality of queues, one that speaks of the true extent of community as it constitutes itself in civil society. What was not expected was that everyone involved did precisely what was expected of them — One Day Sculpture artistic director Claire Doherty generously encouraged symposium delegates to rush over to see Sierra’s work during their lunch break, fully aware of the possibility that the whole thing might be directed against her project; delegates eagerly and patiently lined up to catch a glimpse of exactly what Sierra was doing; Moss performed his unforthcoming Gehilfe act to a T; the sad old man stood for three hours as strangers filed past to look at his penis; Sierra, an artist known for exploiting institutional elements, often to political ends, did just that, and in the most matter-of-fact and juvenile way possible, whose deadpan pragmatism was illustrated beautifully in the work’s tautological title, Person Showing His Penis; and so on. And if everybody did precisely what they were expected, if everybody did their job, the real question around this work is not so much what did it all mean, but what was produced out of all that work? And did we learn anything?

Talking about such production is not new in contemporary art discourse. Rex Butler wrote of the Queensland Art Gallery blockbuster Optimism, in the last issue of Broadsheet no less, of an ‘equivalence made between the works and the audience’, that ‘the work actually is its crowds’, that ‘it actually is made by its spectators’. Brian Holmes is particularly good at it in describing ‘museums that work, museums that form part of the dominant economy, and that change at an increasing rate of acceleration imposed by both the market and the state’. But we’re not talking about museums here; we’re talking about work, the working of the work, the art work. Arguably, though, the terms of the discussion are not dissimilar. After all, isn’t Sierra’s work — and one can argue this about the entirety of his oeuvre — concerned with mobilising precisely the forces that manifest themselves in the new museology, a museology no longer concerned with the self-affirmation of rational, individual bourgeois subjects, but with the wholesale production of human consciousness; mobilising them and turning them against themselves? The work is political then. Or, given our participation, is it politics itself, the shifting ground against which we might define ourselves? Is politics what is produced here?

Let’s step back from that dead-end equation for a moment — if politics is what is produced then we ourselves must also be what is produced, which is not you’d expect from simply lining up to see a person showing his penis — and look elsewhere in art for some kind of clue. Exactly four weeks before a man climbed a staircase and unzipped his fly, an exhibition of the work of Deimantas Narkevicius opened at the Van Abbemuseum in the industrialised Dutch town of Eindhoven. A version of a major retrospective of the important Lithuanian artist’s work prepared by Chus Martinez for the Reina Sofía in Madrid, economised by Martinez and Van Abbe curator Annie Fletcher to provide an elegantly paced, engaging installation in the museum’s historic old wing, The Unanimous Life seems like an odd consideration to raise in the circumstances of trying to come to grips with Sierra’s intervention into One Day Sculpture. The relationship between Narkevicius’s complex cinematic proposition on the nature of memory and truth in a post-Soviet context and Sierra’s self-consciously dirty provocation is not quite clear until we return to the two questions posed earlier, ‘What did we learn?’ and ‘What was produced?’ The only thing that could have been both learned — even if we’re fucked if we know what that was — and produced is knowledge. The staging of the event in its Gehilfe-like structure did not provide any conclusive form of knowledge because it could not; it could only produce it. That knowledge is a function of truth and memory, a circuitous play between proposition, interpretation and retention, qualifies Narkevicius’s work as useful in a discussion of Sierra’s.

This relevance, however, can only be seriously underscored by an unpacking of Narkevicius’s own production in relation to that of two further artists, both of whom are provided, appropriately, by particular instances of his work’s staging—El Lissitzky and Zhang Dali. The relationship of Narkevicius to Lissitzky is the more programmatic, a particular construction of Van Abbemuseum director Charles Esche’s stated desire to link ‘the beginnings of the Soviet experiment with its aftermath’, to ‘bridge the commonly perceived divides in Western European understanding’. The comparison with Zhang Dali is more incidental, and stems from a particular resonance that occurred between works by the two artists through their inclusion in the 2006 Gwangju Biennale, and the critical position that they occupied within a trend in the international exhibition framework that suggested the emergence of the documentary form as commonly understood signifier for ‘world’. There is, of course, far more nuance and structural consequence to these conjunctions than this essay is capable of even touching on, but at the risk of coming over as instrumentalising and production-oriented, there are, for the moment, questions that need to be answered.

To work efficiently and chronologically, then, Fever Variations, the 2006 Gwangju Biennale, included Narkevicius’s 2005 video Matrioškas, which took the form of a series of recollections by three young Lithuanian women describing their experiences as economic émigrés exploited as sex workers in Belgium. Static shots of reflective windowpanes, city views and portentous religious sculptures intercut with handheld ‘talking head’ sequences suggested a work coherent with the popular documentarian style whose aesthetic function is to express the actuality of trauma through its representation. Halfway through the work, however, the process was suddenly interrupted when one of the women supposedly interviewed recounts her own murder, adding the detail of the subsequent disposal of the body with an appropriately pained expression. The women are actors, not simply actors employed by Narkevicius to recount a fictionalised narrative, but actors from the popular Belgian television serial after which the work was named (screened internationally as Russian Dolls), rehearsing the plot of that program from personal recollections of their characters’ points of view. Extraordinarily, though, rather than treating this repositioning of the viewer’s techniques of interpretation as a punchline, a moment of revelation, a dick in a box, Narkevicius continues with the narrative, allowing the third woman to tell her story, which ends, after a short, poetic and oddly redemptive pole-dancing sequence, on the sombre note of a visit to her friend’s grave.

In another part of the biennale building, Zhang Dali presented the entirety of his A Second History—China History Photographic Archive, consisting of a vast collection of images produced and circulated by the Chinese Communist Party. Over the course of 120 didactically installed panels, Zhang systematically demonstrated the extent of the role played by photographic manipulation in the construction of official histories of China. There is nothing new about drawing attention to the propaganda strategies of totalitarian states; such is their familiarity that, for example, those of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the most visible of surviving Stalinist regimes, are now relentlessly parodied to the point of cliché in Western popular culture. The significance of Zhang’s work was not so much its presentation of extreme manifestations, such as the rather chilling removals of various party functionaries from the pages of history, but its highlighting of the prosaicness of the majority of the alterations — placement of figures against more photogenic or symbolically important backgrounds, for example; cropping for composition; airbrushing the occasional wrinkle. The implication of the China History Photographic Archive is that manipulation is intrinsic not just to representations of centralised power, but to its more dispersed form in ‘democratic’ political propaganda and general advertising, and ultimately to representation itself.

Possible readings of Matrioškas are many — Simon Rees has suggested its relevance to the ‘calcification’ of ‘certain stereotypes’ in ‘Western media depictions of Lithuania’ — but in the context of Zhang’s archive, the question of truth in art becomes paramount. But where can this problematisation of truth lead if not to a smug relativisation represented traumas, represented realities? Deimantas Narkevicius’s work never comes across as smug; we can see this across the body of roughly a dozen years of production at the Van Abbe — the tone is sensitive, sincere, reflective, only ever approaching anything like smugness in its caution to avoid sentimentality, but only the resentful could seriously describe such carefulness as smug. How, moreover, do we move from the problematisation of truth and the production of truth? How does the one work do both? Let us look back to the Van Abbe, for this is where Lissitzky comes into play.

The Unanimous Life was presented alongside a pithy selection of works from the museum’s substantial Lissitzky collection, the largest outside the former Soviet Union. This was not the first time that Esche had positioned the two artists alongside one another — Narkevicius’s 2000 film Energy Lithuania, his contribution to the 2001 Venice Biennale, was screened alongside a group of Lissitzkys for around a year following its acquisition by Esche in 2004. Whatever Esche’s specific motivations might be for developing this ongoing dialogue between the artists’ works — and whatever their problematics — the question of ‘What is produced?’ is again what I want to ask here. For Lissitzky could hardly be understood as a partisan of the problematisation of truth. Indeed, as an occasional propagandist he could have been expected to rely to a certain degree on the suspension of doubt in the truth of art, or at least to be aware of the mechanics of that doubt’s negotiation. There is, precisely, an element of exclusion in Lissitzky’s work that reflects the erasures, highlighted by Zhang, of historical figures from history as it is officially recorded, represented at the Van Abbe by a masterfully constructed Proun (1922–23), a sketch for which reveals the excision from the original composition of the spectral name ‘Rosa Luxemburg’. Even if that excision was aesthetic, a purely painterly vanity directed toward the perfect pictorial unity that the Proun incontestably manifests — and there is little in Lissitzky to suggest that it was anything more than aesthetic — it nevertheless constitutes an acknowledgment, no matter how tacit or inadvertent, of representation’s contingency, or of the contingency of truth in representation.

What Lissitzky proposes is a working through of this contingency that produces new truths, truths perhaps not as self-reflexively immunised to their own contingency as the process might suggest, but truths that might at least challenge prevailing frameworks of meaning — counter-truths, or ‘second histories’ as Zhang’s project suggests — or that might participate in the construction of new histories. Again, I’m moving through this quickly; if my logic sounds like totalisation, this is probably because it has been infected with a certain confidence that comes staring too long at Lissitzky’s paintings. Totalisation might be perceived there, too, but it has to be remembered that this kind of avant-gardism was not yet the official artistic language of Soviet Communism, nor did it ever become that language; that honour was of course reserved for socialist realism, which Lissitzky’s and other canonical avant-gardist practices like it existed alongside in a plurality that, for a time at least, included other, more traditional forms. Such considerations are important, for as Reina Sofía Director Manuel J. Borja-Villel reminds us in his preface to the catalogue for The Unanimous Life, ‘To analyse European painting in the 1940s or 1950s, for example, without knowing that it coexisted with neo-realism’ — here he is writing about cinema — ‘is to understand only a part of the story’. Narkevičius does the same with his film The Head, the first work encountered in the Van Abbe exhibition, a documentary assembled from found footage that details the construction of Lev Jefimovich Kerbel’s bust of Marx, which Narkevičius had attempted, but failed, to have relocated from Chemnitz in the former East to the Westphalian town of Münster for the 2007 Sculpture Project — socialist realism is proposed as the excluded other of Western art history. Any totalisation that my line of thinking might express should be tested against such complex understandings.

So the equation as it pertains to Narkevičius goes something like this: if his work suggests that truth is contingent on its representation, that representation inherently problematises truth, it does not necessarily propose that this truth is irrelevant, and in the same process proposes new truths, or at least new understandings of truth. In the case of Matrioškas, for example — one of the works, incidentally, that was not included in the Van Abbemuseum iteration of The Unanimous Life — the unaffected perpetuation of a mythology it has already identified as such serves to remind viewers reassessing their own recollection of mythological narratives presented under the guise of fact that there might still be some relevance to the material. Whatever the accuracy Christa Blümlinger’s assessment of the work that ‘the fact that the story suddenly slips into fiction does not make it invalid but vividly shows the ruining of the lives of Baltic youth’, what remains is that Narkevičius allows the narrative to run its course and mechanics of documentary construction to unfold themselves, which is to say that it is presented for us to make of it what we can, to learn from it what we can.

Now, none of this is intended to suggest that there is a necessarily immediate correlation between what Narkevičius’s work produces and what Sierra’s work produces — both are, after all, very different artists who make very different machines. What I am trying to get at here is a particular function of art, one that Narkevičius’s work at times embodies, and one that might shed at least some kind of light on Sierra’s. What the two artists do have in common is that meaning is performed in or by their work, which is to say that rather than lie in wait for a particularly insightful exegete, meaning manifests itself in the process of encounter, and that it is contingent on the conditions of its presentation, at least to the degree that language is both shared and prone to slippages. The work of both artists therefore operates with a considerable degree of porosity, not to the point of subscribing to the rhetoric of ‘open-endedness and viewer emancipation’ associated with those practices privileged as relational art in the 1990s and in certain degraded forms still visible today, but through the capacity of each to resist reduction to the singular intentional readings — this is why Sierra’s work doesn’t ‘mean’ so much as ‘produce’. Certainly the audience is far more visible in Sierra than in Narkevičius, but each works to destabilise and confuse individually and collectively held notions of truth without outwardly proclaiming its total irrelevance. This is the knowledge they both produce.

Sven Lütticken, cautioning against the trend in art world rhetoric toward parodying scientific language — think of how frequently, lately, you hear the terms ‘research’, ‘laboratory’ and ‘knowledge production’ itself — as an instrumentalisation of the necessarily inconclusive outcomes of artistic work toward quantifiable ends, and worse, as contributions to the contemporary knowledge economy, invokes a widely publicised speech by Donald Rumsfeld, which, on reflection, the exchange at the end of Burn After Reading seems to beautifully satirise. ‘Building’, he suggests, ‘on a famously rambling epistemological statement by Donald Rumsfeld, in which the then US Secretary of Defense mused about the “known knowns”, “known unknowns”, and “unknown unknowns” in the war on terror, one could say that such practices’ articulate the “unknown knowns” of society — its ideological unconscious, its repressed knowledge.’ Lütticken is writing of a specific set of practices he describes as reflexively ‘symptomatological’, but his description that they ‘produce dubious knowledge about knowledge’s other’ is appropriate for my purposes to thinking through the productive aspect of Sierra’s intervention. So I want to hijack it. This is one thing we might have learned from Person Showing His Penis. Something dubious. Which, as it turns out, we probably knew at the time.

Raquel Ormella: She went that way

Among the dozens of projects I worked on in my time at Artspace, Raquel Ormella's 2009 survey "She went that way" and its accompanying catalogue are among the things of which I'm proudest - largely thanks to the integrity of the artist, which made for a satisfying exhibition. This was the lead essay I wrote for the catalogue.

‘Where is the artist?’ This is the question that occurs to me most frequently when appreciating the various threads of Raquel Ormella’s practice. Such is the consistency of the voice with which the work speaks, its unmistakable timbre across the drawings, textiles, installations, interventions, publications, videos and multiples that make up Ormella’s multifarious oeuvre. Yet it is a voice that gives away little of the body from which it issues, even when this body is pictured directly in the work. ‘Raquel Ormella’ is never articulated as a specific identity, only as the unmistakable author of a complex of traces, vestiges that might reveal the shape but never the substance — nor, in the final analysis, the whereabouts — of the presence that left them, only ever offering directions.

This is why the phrase that gives the publication, and the exhibition project it complements, seems, to my mind at least, the best possible answer to that question — ‘She went that way’. It suggests the simultaneously elusive and irreducible relationship of an artist to her work, and the experience of encountering that work, of registering its distinctive voice in the absence of the artist. Rather than being merely incidental, by-products of the work’s presentation as art, these relationships and encounters sit close to its productive core. They are, as much as anything else, the politics that constitute the work’s immediate field of operation: shifting economies of power and desire that manifest themselves visually, spatially and discursively in patterns of which the artist is clearly not unaware and demonstrably not uncritical. As astutely as Ormella engages social questions, her work is characterised by its critical self-awareness and its persistent consideration of the ethical roles and responsibilities of the artist, always articulated with that aesthetic consistency, that clear and singular voice.

In Ormella’s work, the inherent reflexivity of contemporary art provides a mechanism for interrogating the artist’s own agency and authority as she interfaces with questions of relevance to the world at large. The preoccupations with political and environmental issues that become manifest in Ormella’s art-making do extend from, as well as into, sustained, in-depth research and close involvement with a number of social movements. But her work is singular in its capacity to constructively problematise romantic notions of art and activism alike. For all its social and political relevance, it regularly returns to properly artistic questions; if the work prompts me to ask ‘Where is the artist?’, surely, then, this can only be because the artist has already asked ‘What is an artist?’, ‘What does it mean to be an artist?’, ‘What does it mean to be an artist in the world?’

In this sense, Ormella’s practice is a sophisticated and evolving process of self-reflection, a means by which the artist attempts to take account of her place as an agent in the world, and to act on it. In this critical understanding of aestheticising tendencies in approaches to art and to social change, exercised by an artist committed to exploring both, and to doing so aesthetically, an interrogation of the relationship between authorship and authority is paramount, manifesting itself at different levels of Ormella’s production. She has, for example, consistently explored various modes of collective and collaborative production as an extension of both her studio practice and the broader social concerns of her work. Personal and collective memory emerge as further themes in the artist’s own reflections, in histories recounted by others and in encounters staged between the two. Significant also is the issue of space, from questions of propriety as they pertain to the use of urban geography, to provocative investigations of the impact of human activity on the natural environment. These questions extend to the politics of appropriating socially, collectively or anonymously authored narratives and cultural objects, and presenting them as the work of a single artist through their configuration within the gallery space.

And yet, for all this reflection on authorship, very little of the author is evident in the work at the level of content. At a time when the stake of the political in art is so often invested in a politics of identity, or even, in broader aesthetic terms, to the very production of identity through art, Ormella’s relationship to her work is that of an identity that produces. It is not so much that the artist strives for anonymity — the gendered pronoun ‘She’ in ‘She went that way’, suggestive as it is of a specific sexual politics, also implies a specific person, a specific artist — but that she attempts, at least, to resist the autobiographical impulse. Each time a reference to the self appears — the ‘I’ pronoun in Ormella’s banner works and slogans; images of the artist in certain videos and photographs; clear traces of her hand in sewn, drawn and painted works; even snippets of personal correspondence — it is decontextualised, such that as in a first-person novel, it poses the possibility of its own fiction at the same time as acting as a point of identification for the audience. Even when elements of autobiography do slip through, as in the family postcards on whose verso are drawn stills from Pedro Almodovar’s 1988 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in the important but underseen work While Sleeping (2000), they are fragmented, obscured and distanced enough to negate the possibility of a confessional or exhibitionist reading.

‘This would be easier if I was making a documentary’ — the phrase exemplifies the open-ended reference to self that appears throughout Ormella’s work. The artist acknowledges her presence, admitting her anxieties about the process in which she is engaged as if to declare them as a variable that might affect the work’s outcome. At the same time the phrase expresses a recognition that art is not documentary; Ormella’s reflexive approach to art making is both particular, insofar as it relates to a specific project, and general, in the sense that it offers an observation about the nature of art, or at least of how art might differ from other modes of cultural production and, importantly, what relationship it bears to truth. And in introducing the figure of doubt, it suggests the artist’s own fallibility. ‘I am the author’, it seems to say, ‘but I don’t have the authority to tell you what to think.’ More so — in this fallibility it proposes the need for an active and inclusive political space marked by debate and discussion rather than simple consensus, the ‘agonistic public sphere’ as Chantal Mouffe has framed it, inviting a certain agency: ‘Let’s have a conversation.’

The phrase originated in the process of Ormella’s researching and reflecting on the work I used to live here (2001–09). Created for the group exhibition Temporary Fixtures, curated by Jacqueline Phillips for Artspace in 2001, I used to live here explores the recent history of the Gunnery building through interviews with a number of the artists who had famously squatted in the space prior to its conversion into an arts facility, now dominated physically — and publicly — by Artspace. Through slide projections, diary notes and a video documenting traces of the building’s previous inhabitants, the work details the integration of the Gunnery squat with local activist histories, particularly the antinuclear movement, and the rapid transformation of Sydney’s urban geography during the 1990s. In the process, though, it also evinced conflicting accounts and longstanding personal enmities between participants. Ormella’s reflection on the difference between artistic and documentarian approaches to history and truth suggests that collective memory can be just as contested a ground as public space.

The first person pronoun, however, is not limited to this single phrase. It recurs in text form throughout Ormella’s practice, most notably the extensive series of double-sided banner works, not included in She went that way, collectively titled I’m worried this will become a slogan (1999–2009), through such poignant registers of creative and ethical uncertainty as ‘I’m wondering whether this says anything’ and ‘I’m worried I’m not political enough’. The tense in these works is significant; what Ormella describes as their ‘continually present moment’ — ‘I am’, ‘this would’ — distinguishes them as works of art, objects that will be encountered in a gallery as a form over time. This is further emphasised in her decision to revisit certain works in She went that way, in particular I used to live here, updated and restaged in the very site it dealt with and in which it was first presented eight years earlier, grounding the work, and indeed the exhibition, within a particular institutional history.

The materiality, the physical detail of the works, is important to their status as art, to the politics of their reading within the reflexive and institutional context of the gallery, and to the historical associations that might be produced by that encounter. That the hand cut letters sewn to a sheet of plain flannelette to read ‘This would be easier if I was making a documentary’ simultaneously recall suffragette banners, protest workshops and the yellowing documents of a post-object ‘aesthetic of administration’ is appropriate to the complex dialogues with feminism, activism and conceptualism in which Ormella has engaged across her practice.

Crucial, though, is the anonymity of the ‘I’, the work’s reluctance to give away any more than what is contained in the text. Ormella clearly realises that one of the specificities of the use of language in art, as opposed to everyday speech, is its capacity to allow the viewing subject to inhabit the empty pronoun. It becomes a possible locus of engagement in which the artist’s disclaimer that the work is authored and the viewer’s desire for meaning might coalesce and commune as a singularity; it is the self that never closes itself off to the other.

What of Ormella’s specific presence might be detectable in her work, and this is precisely what gives her practice its aesthetic consistency, is her tendency to utilise the ‘I’ as a limit — a hermeneutic limit, in the sense that so little of the author is presented as an aid to interpretation, forcing attention back onto context and location, and ultimately toward the issues at hand; and a formal limit, the hand-made quality of so much of her work, which, though assured, seems to internalise the possibility of its own failure, a very human failure. This second aspect is most visible in the hand-drawn lettering of the editioned field guides to the problematic Indian Myna that make up one part of the set of multiples concerned with the bird, Varied, Noisy (2008), and in the painterly hesitancy of the wall drawing on which she collaborated with Melbourne artist Andrew McQualter to complement the presentation of the multiples in She went that way. It can also be seen in the felt-tip pen ink that soaks the dozens of postcards and cardboard figures of While Sleeping (2000), and in the erratically sized lettering of I’m worried this will become a slogan, the Howard-era newspeak phrases that adorn her Australia Rising and Things that have not changed banners, and of course ‘This would be easier if I was making a documentary’ itself.

But beyond the clear traces of the artist’s hand, it should be said that her body and its operation also act as formal limits for works utilising more mechanical, which is to say less immediately gestural, technologies. The recent Walking through clearfells (2009), for example, whose dual-screen, full wall projection confronted viewers on entering She went that way, owes a good part of its effect on the relationship of the artist’s body to representational technology as a marker of her irreducible role in producing the material form of the work. Consisting of two channels of high-definition video, it tracks in great detail the passage of a female and male figure — the artist and the cinematographer — as they traverse zones of increasing devastation left in three clearfell logging areas in Tasmania’s Styx and Florentine Valleys. Deliberately eschewing Romantic traditions of picturing landscape according Cartesian principles, the camera is pointed down to what once was a forest floor, offering no horizon for viewers to orient themselves against, instead slowly revealing the fire-ravaged ground, empty stumps and various debris left by large-scale commercial logging. Using a radically reductive method of framing, the inclusion of the legs and muddied boots of the camera operators, and the contingency of the camera’s movement on that of the figures as they carefully negotiate the landscape continues Ormella’s self-reflexive acknowledgment of her role as an author and mediator. The much earlier Mission Brown (1999), though shot in the contrastingly outmoded medium of Video 8, is similarly reliant on the physical limitations of a technology and its operator. Taking its name from the shade of paint used by local councils in the Sydney basin to erase graffiti, it documents, without comment, the odd shapes produced by mission brown paint hastily splashed over graffiti at Doonside station in Sydney’s west. Each shot lasts roughly a second, but the precise duration varies — Ormella edited the work in camera, attempting to stop the device from recording immediately after activating it.

In all of these cases, the fallible or doubting self remains the pathos of the work, but this self’s refusal to fixate on itself as content is the critical mechanism that enables the political aspect of the work to exceed mere content, constructing a properly political space out of the space of encounter. In other words, it is in the work’s specificity as a work of art, rather than as a piece of propaganda, that it provides the ground for discussion of the issues with which it grapples. It is political in operation as well as content. That it exists so exclusively within the rarefied space of the gallery is certainly not lost on the artist, but then Ormella’s practice is not the search for a mass audience; it is the investigation of modes of engagement that differ qualitatively from those put to work in the mass media and in the spectacular aspects of daily life — urban geography, commodified leisure time, representational politics, and so on.

This problematising approach to modes of aesthetic address, and to the political authority of the author, extends to Ormella’s incorporation of collaborative strategies into her practice at various levels. Her invitation to Andrew McQualter to join her in the production of a setting in which to present Varied, Noisy is not isolated within her practice. Since 2002, she has worked with Sydney artist Regina Walter to write and illustrate the fanzine Flaps, now running to sixteen issues. Walking through clearfells and the trio of whiteboard works that connect it to While Sleeping in a formal sense — Poster Reduction (2005), 130 Davey Street (2005) and Wild Rivers: Cairns, Brisbane, Sydney (2008) — developed out of a long-term and continuing engagement with the Wilderness Society and its campaigns to protect old growth forest in Tasmania and rivers in Queensland, an engagement undertaken from a perspective that constructively critiques certain aspects of the society’s activist aesthetics. At another level, Going Back / Volver (2006) involved the cooperation of large number of Chilean émigrés whose hands were photographed holding snapshots of their families in transit to Australia. Ormella’s friends and fellow artists are often involved in the production of technically complex works such as Walking through clearfells and the labour-intensive stitching and unpicking of the Australia Rising and Things that have not changed series, whose genesis, Ormella has noted, owes much to the involvement of a number of women in stitching the iconic Eureka flag.

Another form of collaboration is presented by The Domain, Sydney, February 2001 (2001–09). The work deals with a similar council cleanup to Mission Brown, involving a site very close to Artspace, on a wall erected next to the Eastern Suburbs Railway Line as it enters a tunnel under the expansive parkland of the Domain. Reproduced as a postcard is a photograph of an ugly, brown, enamel patch on the wall’s original bare concrete, next to which Ormella has daubed, as a matter of public record, ‘The political graffiti, which lasted on this wall for more than 10 years, was recently painted mission brown’. A sketch on the rear of the postcard brings the original slogan, concerning the visit of a US nuclear ship to Sydney Harbour — a campaign with which the Gunnery tenants at the time were involved — back to life. The postcard form opens up the possibility of the viewer taking the image out of the gallery, of dispersing copies into the world, perhaps even of comparing it to the original site, which, one might discover, is now blocked by strategically planted trees, and, with the exception of a small patch of concrete near Sir John Young Crescent, painted entirely mission brown.

Domain’s decentering of presentational authority is extended in Varied, Noisy through the a range of modes of viewer engagement offered by the series of multiples whose dispersal, moreover, bears conceptual significance to its subject matter. Varied, Noisy accords its audience the status of participants in the framing and distribution of the work and in the production of its meaning. Alongside the field guide, the series of editioned multiples includes a field guide, a parallel groove record and sets of woven patches and rubber stamps. Varied, Noisy deals, like Walking through clearfells, with the impact of human activity of the environment, in this case through the figure of the Indian or Common Myna. The Myna, whose raucous call gives the work its title, thrives in areas of human habitation, threatening local bird populations through its aggressive territorial behaviour. The form of the multiples is important, as their dispersal mimics the patterns of the human activity — road building and land clearing — that aids the distribution of the Myna. This is emphasised by the inclusion of interactive works, the record whose parallel grooves on both sides play different tracks depending on where the viewer places the stylus, and rubber stamps through which the audience becomes a collaborator in the physical production of the work.

As much as these gestures constitute a dispersal or redistribution of authorial responsibility, they fall short of negating it outright. That the work is clearly authored, and that it announces this aesthetically and discursively, suggests the impossibility and therefore the disingenuousness of abrogating its authorship from the point of view of accountability. And this, I believe, is what the relationship between authorship and authority in Ormella’s practice turns on. The question of the location of the artist within the exchange between the work and its audience, or between an object that the artist produces and the world it is inserted into, is, ultimately, an ethical question. It is an ethics that underscores the political in Ormella’s artistic output, whether this is considered in the narrow sense of the issues, raised by the work, that have great significance to the social and cultural context in which the artist operates, or in the broader sense of this very operation. Or, perhaps more accurately, in the continuity of these two senses — the commonality of the ‘I’, of what is shared in the performative exchange between the work and its public and what is produced in that interaction, suggests that the ethics that underpins the political content of the work is inseparable from that which informs its production and presentation.

As an ethical proposition, Ormella’s work returns us again and again to the question of world, of what it means to be and to do in the presence of others. Does it matter, then, where the artist is in this world? Which way she went does not seem to be a question that can ever be adequately answered by the work alone. But it undeniably does matter, for the location of the artist, even if it can never be divulged to the audience, is of fundamental importance to the artist herself. And, given the embeddedness of her work, its tendency to defer attention away from its author to its context and location, it certainly matters where she has been. But the question I have been asking all along might be the wrong one. What really matters is not so much where the artist is, but what she does there. And it matters also that this doing is accompanying by a self-reflection as rigorous as the criticality that might be applied to the world. Never self-negating, it is always mutually empowering. By inviting us in, by making us pause to consider the figure of the artist as an actor in the world, by allowing us, however briefly, to inhabit the ‘I’ and to resist, as it does, the closure of our own selves to others, Ormella’s work tells us that it matters what we do as well.

On Curatorship, Institutional and Otherwise (more notes on embedded criticism)

The Storr-Enwezor polemic was indeed far from over, and culminated in the thoroughly ungratifying exchange at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney that you can relive in the video below. I was in the audience, seated directly behind Okwui, who was with Terry Smith, who had a bone to pick with me about my citation of him in the earlier essay but never got to pick it because of what happens in the video. That's Thomas Berghuis asking the trolling question by the way. In any case, the rule is, you never attack from the podium. Always from the floor. This was published in Volume 37, issue 4 of Broadsheet in December 2008.

The title of this essay, or rather, of this loose sequence of notes that rehearse, repetitively but with modest variation, a handful of familiar ideas, should provide a clue, at the outset, to an ambiguity lying at its heart. The title is, like the essay, inadequate, and inherently so. To indicate continuity with a similar, earlier essay, its syntax had required a single noun to describe its subject. But where it is safe to say that criticism, on whose current state that earlier text had offered several thoughts, is a generally accepted term, no single word exists to describe what it is that curators actually do. The Oxford Dictionary’s official term, curatorship, refers less to an activity than to the state of being a curator, while the two most popular alternatives, curation and curating, are derivatives of a back-formation — the latter a gerund at that! — that was only accepted into the dictionary two years ago, and, as the red wavy lines on my screen tell me, are still not considered legitimate by the leading brand of word processing software. Curatorship, then, at least according to those twin linguistic pillars of my dictionary and my spellchecker, is the least worst option.

This lack of consensus is appropriate, for as each conference paper, book chapter and superficial magazine profile on the subject inevitably attests, the referent itself is not constant; almost, but not quite. Not that there is a causal relationship here; though it is now appears alongside seemingly any organisational activity involving art, the flexibility of the word ‘curator’ is hobbled to a large degree by its etymology, closer in structure to ‘doctor’ or ‘author’ (who do you know who docts or auths?) than to ‘painter’ or ‘writer’. It is more that curatorial practice embodies a series of tensions, conflicts between its propositional and meditational approaches to meaning, between intellectual and technical priorities, between experimental practice and accessible forms of presentation, between authority and the potential for reflexivity, each of which is resolved differently in the hands of individual practitioners operating at distinct institutional and commercial registers. Moreover, it persists within, affected by and often pretending to affect, a sociopolitical context that is in a state of permanent — and, at the time of writing, overt — crisis. Should overstatement be required, one might say that all cultural activities taking place within this framework are themselves in crisis, but curatorship, whatever its ultimate definition, and understanding it is not the best descriptor, seems, for the moment, under no such threat.

Criticism, on the other hand, seems particularly apposite to such a trope, with the event, or at least the imminence, of the practice’s perceived irrelevance frequently framed along the lines of crisis or, with even greater gravity, death. Naturally the prognosis is melodramatic; criticism as a specialised activity continues to be practised and to be practisable. But it does so with fewer potential outlets, its column inches having been usurped by belletrism and the advertising copy that goes by the name ‘art writing’, while, perhaps more pressingly for critics, its authority as an arbitrating mechanism is in steady decline. But for all the attention that critics have paid to the demise of their profession, surprisingly little time has been spent entertaining the notion that they themselves might have been responsible for this very passing. But perhaps this reluctance isn’t so surprising; with so little time left, is there any dignity in such reflection? Better, it seems, to note, with a touch of resentment, the ascendancy of those curators who were so quick to occupy the seats they left empty (or from which they were pushed by the invisible hand of the market), assuming the authority of the critics, performing their legitimating function with so much aplomb but so little rigour. And in whose interest? What use is there in one curator attacking another from the podium — in the name of dialogue, of all things — beyond invalidating a competing curatorial premise? Settling old scores? Where is the dignity in that?

Criticism is not dead, at least not yet, for its life has still not passed before its eyes. Should it, in whatever time it thinks it has left, discover a taste for situational irony, it might look to the current prominence of curatorship and think of its own days in the sun, not out of nostalgia, but in the interests of continuity. For if curators would ultimately displace the authority of the critics, they did this as the critics’ most attentive students. After all, had criticism not once made itself so broadly relevant, so vital to the discursive framing of artistic practice that it was near impossible to ignore? Did it not once speak with a confidence that would, regardless of the intentions of its authors, establish its pronouncements if not as orthodoxy then at the very least as principle, to be taken up and used in practice? This was a period in which criticism enjoyed, or at least remembers enjoying, considerable influence on the presentation, reception, and arguably even the production of art. By the late 1980s and certainly by the early 1990s, works of poststructural art criticism, in particular, constituted foundation texts for the teaching of art history, theory and practice. Not only did the generation training during this period assimilate many of the theoretical contributions and intellectual positions offered by poststructuralism, but its embrace of disciplines outside of those within the conventional purview of art history — from psychoanalysis to postcolonial studies to political economy, and further, to literature and film studies — would serve as a model for the increasing emphasis within curatorial practice on porosity and flexibility, conditions demanded by the new information economy and emergent artistic paradigms alike. So while the practitioners of specialised forms of criticism, especially those complemented by academic research, no longer feel that the same sense of purchase for their work, it continues to inform current practice, albeit under different conditions.

If poststructuralism actively rejected modernist criticism’s tendency to isolate aesthetic developments, and specifically artistic developments, from the rest of collective life — and it might be said that defining this boundary was one of modernist criticism’s central preoccupations — it nevertheless persisted with the ideal of critical distance, that is to say, the possibility of a position at sufficient remove from their objects to allow for the production of an unaffected criticism. As I have argued elsewhere, criticism, when understood as commentary on art, artists and developments inside or affecting the art world, has increasingly issued from positions of embeddedness, which is to say, that it has been offered not by professional critics, but by curators, and is thus ever open to the potential for conflict of interest. While there remains the question of whether a real distance was ever possible, it seems more constructive to look to the potential that proximity might hold for criticality, a criticality not limited to the tradition of critical writing. In this sense, the concept of embedded criticism might be extended to the conditions of practice currently affecting curatorial inquiry.

Much of the current potential for embedded criticism lies in the practices characteristic of what Mick Wilson has described as the discursive turn, that ‘strange complementarity and synchronicity between the ascendency of the curatorial gesture and the advocacy of language exchange as a paradigm of practice’. To this confluence might be added the increasing confidence of cultural practitioners — which is to say curators and artists alike — in appropriating the language and modes of address of specialised forms of criticism. Stimulated by the institutional legitimation of conversational and collaborative artistic forms, this faculty has seen the primacy of exhibition making in curatorial and artistic activity complemented and in some cases even displaced by a conscious emphasis on initiating and facilitating various forms of discussion. Apart from preparing critical writing in industry publications, these activities also include the creation of new platforms for discussion, from public events promoting varying degrees of audience participation, to significant training and publishing programs directly operated by artistic institutions. Given the centrality of discourse production to the work of curators, and the significant portion of this activity that is focused on curatorial practice itself, from postgraduate programs to conferences and publications, we might say that embedded criticism describes not only the problematic phenomenon of curators performing the role of critics, but also the potential for that critical faculty to be self-directed. We might say that, in light of the genealogy sketched out above, two of the defining of conditions of curatorial practice are authority and reflexivity — the legitimating authority once enjoyed by criticism; and a reflexivity that has been practised by artists for decades, but never with such authority.

It should be stressed that following this line of thought is by no means intended to perpetuate certain myths that have propagated around curatorial practice, nor to apologise for vanities and excesses attending it that are unfortunately all too real. Contrary to journalistic cliché, the role of the curator has not so much changed — this would imply the impossibility of earlier modes of operation — as expanded to include new possibilities, while much remains the same. Indeed certain quarters manifest an overt hostility to the idea of reflexivity, while for others there seems to be little or no awareness, or at the very least acknowledgment, that a discursive turn has even taken place. It has also become possible to affect reflexivity as a decoy for carrying on business as usual, or as a device to preclude criticism. More often, however, change has occurred in a negative sense, where, in a shift mirroring those in other related professions — most notably art history, and of course, criticism — economic, bureaucratic and institutional conditions have forced curators to take on administrative and promotional responsibilities, managing departments or entertaining patrons, at the expense of sustained research and engagement with artistic practice, a shift that results in less rather than more intellectual and practical freedom. So although I will refer to concrete examples, the figure of the curator sketched here is an abstraction, neither a cynical caricature nor a utopian paradigm, more of the base unit of the sum total of potentialities presented by current practice — an altogether optimistic abstraction.

No discussion of contemporary curatorship is complete without mention of biennales, and with good reason. After all, it was the rapid proliferation of the large-scale exhibition form that was the vehicle for the ascendancy of the curator, for whom executive roles were created, while they were at the same time ostensibly freed from the orthodoxies and responsibilities of the institutions for which they continued to work, precisely because of each event’s transience and, to some degree, the novelty of the form. As good students of criticism, curators, have, of course, been able to instrumentalise these structures to question problematic aspects of their form, such as power relations between curators and artists (as with Molly Nesbitt, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Utopia Station at the 2003 Venice Biennale), or their affirmation of geocultural hierarchies (as with Okwui Enwezor’s shifting platforms for Documenta 11, and various iterations of the Gwangju and Havana Biennales). The frequently noted tendency of biennales to homogenise the presentation of art, no matter the context, exists in uneasy tension with their decentering effect, the creation of opportunities for artists working outside of the art world’s traditional centres. By the end of the 1990s, it was clear that the curator was an archetypal figure of globalisation, not simply as its agent, but as the self-aware embodiment of its contradictions, from labour relations to international market dynamics.

Along these lines, no discussion of biennales is complete without mention of the notion of spectacle, but for somewhat less solid reasons. Most often, spectacle is equated with scales of assembly — of which biennales are the obvious example — as if a smaller exhibition could not be spectacular simply because of its modest size. If Guy Debord is frequently invoked as the progenitor of the term, most recently on the cover of an issue of Art Asia Pacific covering the plethora of biennales opening across the region in this year’s Asian autumn emblazoned with the title of his best known book, his theory on the subject seems only partially understood. Very early on in his formulation of the term, Debord is at pains to point out, paraphrasing Marx, that ‘the spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship among people mediated by images’, and that it is the totality of social life, the singular spectacle, or society of the spectacle, in Debord’s terminology, that is the immense accumulation, not of images, but of a plurality of spectacles, capital accumulated to the point that it becomes image. The distinction is important, for it describes relationships of power and exploitation that have invented a visual form for themselves. The real test of the biennale’s status as spectacle, and its reflexive response to that status, is better understood not, therefore, in terms of its scale, or how quickly visitors are forced to take it all in, but in its production, reproduction and mediation of the social relationships that constitute spectacle.

Among other constants, critical reception of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s 2008 Biennale of Sydney generally included two observations of relevance here. The first was to reiterate the widely accepted view that the highlight of the biennale was the use as a venue of Cockatoo Island, a former penal colony and shipping works in the middle of Sydney Harbour. The second was to note Christov-Bakargiev’s allusion in her catalogue essay to the idea that the exhibition was a decoy. Precisely what the exhibition was a decoy for was never clearly delineated, and although Christov-Bakargiev offered suggestions elsewhere — these included creating an opportunity to work with certain artists and an attempt to elude the tendency of the thematic marketing of large-scale exhibitions to delimit their reception — the possibility was left open, no doubt intentionally.

Cockatoo Island was indeed a striking choice, anticipated only by Jonathan Watkins’s use of Goat Island in his 1998 biennale Every Day — a far smaller component, but one made memorable by the inclusion of Martin Creed’s Half the Space in a Given Room. Playing into international and parochial perceptions of Sydney as the ‘harbour city’ — indeed every biennale venue was located on or overlooking the water — the walls of the island’s abandoned and unadorned architecture nevertheless undercut this ideology by bearing mute witness to the city’s secret history of punitive, colonial, racial and industrial exploitation. Importantly, the site had been rarely visited by even long-term inhabitants of the city, and, with the exception of Urs Fischer’s John Kaldor Art Project on the island’s northern shore two years earlier, it carried none of the history of viewing that mediated presentations at other more established venues. Visitor experience of the venue, from the half hour ferry ride and its inevitable association with Venetian vaporetto trips, to the negotiation of unfamiliar terrain and the need to actively seek out the work, was one of anticipation and discovery, transacting in an economy of desire remarkably similar to that which underpins the spectacle of tourism.

Simon Sheikh, following Frazer Ward, has noted that within the history of institutional critique, exhibition-making is certainly of spectacular origin, constructing modes of instruction and address reproducing and at the same time constituting the values of the emergent bourgeois public sphere: rationality, order, and so on. So too is the biennale form itself, developing out of the world fairs of high capitalism to exploit the popular bourgeois pastime of tourism, in the context of competition between former city-states to establish a certain primacy within newly liberal-democratic nation-states. Of course, it is unfair to criticise a given biennale on the basis of the origin of its form, and indeed a self-reflexive understanding of this origin now informs the construction of a great many biennales, including, importantly, Christov-Bakargiev’s exhibition. But for the purposes of thinking through that biennale, it is equally important to observe the points of convergence between exhibition-making and tourism: both providing a certain confluence of knowledge and pleasure, of information and experience. That much-criticised — perhaps over-criticised — aspect of biennales, the vernissage, with its emphasis on exclusivity and self-representation, seeing and being seen, shares the sense of performance and ritual of tourism; there is a striking similarity in the extent to which participants in both activities seem intent on actively caricaturing themselves.

The decoy function of Christov-Bakargiev’s biennale, then, was to use what would become its most celebrated moment to highlight the spectacular potential of the exhibition’s presentational form at its most basic, spatial level, in the construction of human experience. Appropriate to its avant-gardist sensibilities, its fetishisation of the 1960s as a period of change and its romantic account of modernist art, Revolutions: Forms that Turn might be described in terms of Renato Poggioli’s ‘agonistic moment’, the drive to self-immolation that ‘welcomes and accepts this self-ruin as an obscure or unknown sacrifice to the success of future movements’.

Agonism has of course taken on a somewhat different sense in recent contemporary art debates, due in no small part to the influence of the pluralistic model of democracy advanced by Chantal Mouffe. Mouffe’s notion of an agonistic public sphere has found particular resonance with the coupling, in much curatorial practice, of a melancholic resignation to the failure of attempts at radical social change with a pragmatic approach to the potential for institutional platforms to play a role in shaping and enfranchising their publics, which is to say, as legitimate sites of contestation.

It was this second sense of agonism that defined another moment of the Art Compass series of biennales initiated by Sydney, the 2008 Gwangju Biennale, Annual Report, an exhibition explicitly, rather than implicitly, concerned with its own status as spectacle. Taking as its point of departure the brutally suppressed Gwangju uprising of 18 May 1980, a moment that has arguably defined each edition of the biennale since its inception in 1995, artistic director Okwui Enwezor and curators Ranjit Hoskote and Hyunjin Kim posited the exhibition as ‘a forum for collective authorship’ and as ‘a space of encounter … a site of intense negotiation between the public, artworks, artists, curators and producers’.

Crucially, Enwezor sought to decentre the exhibition’s authorship, attempting to reject, as he did with Documenta 11, the figure of the curator as auteur by employing a collaborative curatorium, in contrast to the model utilised in Sydney, which has persisted — one might speculate for financial reasons — with the structure of a single curator, advised in Christov-Bakargiev's case by a team of ‘comrades’. The curatorium’s central project, titled On the Road, was similarly counter-authorial, restaging a host of solo artist exhibitions — including an entire Gordon Matta-Clark retrospective — that had taken place since the beginning of 2007, each of whose source was fastidiously footnoted in a curious form of curatorial citation described self-effacingly by Hoskote as a ‘workmanlike survey of developments’. This was offset by five ‘position papers’, smaller experimental group exhibition projects organised by younger curators, and a number of ‘insertions’, new works commissioned for the biennale. Most strikingly, the approach to displaying these three major components was to mingle them across the biennale’s exhibition spaces — even the points at which three of the five position papers began and ended were not immediately distinguishable — so that without reference to wall labels or the exhibition guide, it was possible to read the entire project as a single collective statement.

Both of the biennale’s propositions, considering itself as a forum for collective authorship and a space of encounter, were intended to reflect aspects of the Gwangju uprising, an expression of democratic power constructed in direct opposition to a dictatorial state, indicating ways in which ‘modes of collective expression and coalition-building can transform the streets into a veritable space of encounter for the social demands of the civic body of the citizens’. As a reflection, though, the biennale was also posited as a model for emergent forms of civil society coherent with Mouffe’s agonistic democracy, albeit one framed in terms that were less Mouffe’s than of Agamben’s ‘coming community’. In this sense, it constituted very much the reflexive use of an institution, one with rather extraordinary ties to its local community — if the centrality of the biennale to the self-image of Gwangju, a city with barely any other contemporary art infrastructure, is any measure — as the platform for a spatiotemporal allegory of an imagined world, an attempt to invert the function of spectacle from the ‘autonomous movement of the non-living’ through a determinedly localised (and Bakhtinian) redirection of presentational desire economies toward a merging of adventure-time and everyday-time, rather than a touristic separation from everyday life.

To some degree, the discursive turn in art has been represented and enacted as the introduction of conversational activities into contemporary art as a means of contextualising and elaborating artistic practice, and in some cases constituting that practice. This view is not so much incorrect as incomplete. As Wilson notes, the use of the term ‘discourse’ is deliberate, as a device for conjuring and performing power, thus its occasionally overlooked importance for curators as they attempt, should they as embedded critics feel the inclination, to grapple with the consequences of their recently acquired authority. The ascendency of non-exhibition-based discursive activities, which provide the appearance, at least, of horizontality between institutions, curators, artists and audiences, should not obscure the reflexive understanding that exhibition-making, the spatiotemporal structure of experience, is itself a discursive activity.

In 2008, the Biennale of Sydney and the Gwangju Biennale both departed from such an understanding, providing exemplary, not to mention compelling, reflections on exhibition-making in relation to the language of power, which is to say, to spectacle, through markedly different uses of agonism. But where the latter proposed a viable alternative in its collectivity, Sydney, despite its sincere attempts to do otherwise, offered an account of the contemporary that was so authorial as to be idiosyncratic. Reflexivity in curatorship is a condition of the practice that is highly worth amplifying in order for criticality to remain in play even without critics. But in order to avoid the endgame of an authority that reflects on its authority and does little else, this reflexivity must be directed toward the progressive dissolution of authority through the resources that very authority provides. To appropriate, for a moment and with complete awareness of its limitations, the romantic, egalitarian language of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s biennale, the role of any avant-garde should be to necessitate the conditions of its own dissolution. Indulgences aside, this might be worth bearing in mind, should embedded criticism one day face its own crisis.