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.

On Criticism, Institutional and Otherwise

From Broadsheet (vol. 37, number 2, June 2008,  pp. 99-101). I wrote a follow-up to this piece when the Storr-Enwezor polemic turned out to be far from over.

I was partial to tragedy in my youth. That was before experience taught me that life was tragical enough without my having to write about it.
— Burgess Meredith as Ammon, in Clash of the Titans (1981)

From last September until April this year, a rather extraordinary debate played out in the pages of Artforum, beginning with a cluster of reviews, and continuing through a series of letters to the editor. The debate centred on umbrage taken by 2007 Venice Biennale director Robert Storr to several responses to his exhibition Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense, that were published in a general round-up of last year’s European Grand Tour, in the magazine’s September 2007 issue. Obviously allowing time for consideration and no doubt hindered by a demanding schedule, Storr waited until Artforum’s January 2008 issue to respond, but did so in the unprecedented form of an 8,000 word letter, which was published by the magazine in full. As a matter of practice, the three writers whose criticisms Storr had singled out as particularly nefarious, Jessica Morgan, Francesco Bonami and Okwui Enwezor, were approached by the magazine for rebuttals, which owing to matters of time and conceivably column space, were held over until the following issue. In the April issue, Storr fired back, with Enwezor responding in kind. For their parts, Bonami provided only a one-line quote from Philip Roth, and there was, for whatever reason, no further word from Morgan.

Sadly, but perhaps predictably, the tone of the debate descended to the personal, with patronising lessons in curatorial practice and apparent attempts to settle old scores abounding, reducing whatever relevant points were in fact made to the level of farce. Professional relationships, it seems, have been irreparably soured. And while it is tempting to bemoan the lack of sophistication and restraint on display, and even more tempting to find some adolescent glee in witnessing the spectacle of figures of authority clashing so personally in public, much like watching two of your high school teachers slug it out in a pub fight — and to be sure, collated photocopies of the exchange make wonderful reading on public transport — the whole incident raises some interesting questions around the role of criticism in the art world of the early twenty first-century. For it doesn’t take long to realise that all of the critics involved in this particular debate are themselves curators, and thus open to be both held accountable for, and motivated in the interest of, their own professional practices.

It should be said that in the visual arts, criticism is rarely lucrative enough to constitute a profession. More often than not, critical writing is the extension, complement or rearticulation of another practice, whether curatorial, as in the above instances, or artistic, academic or editorial; a practice that is in many cases itself supported by part- or full-time employment in a related or — just as likely — entirely unrelated field. While this is especially the case in Australia, where by and large, writer’s fees are hardly sufficient recompense for the time and energy required to produce clear, considered analysis,  even by minimum wage standards, the multi-disciplinarity of contemporary critical practice is not entirely reducible to immediate financial pressures. The economics of the situation are arguably far more complex, wholly in keeping with the logic of flexibility that characterises the ‘ideal type’ of post-Fordist capitalism, that paradigmatic figure created by the rapid growth of casual and ‘immaterial’ labour, informational and affective production, and the fetishisation of spontaneity, mobility and openness as core values of a contemporary hegemonic morality. It is therefore not unusual, and in fact increasingly common, to see significant, firmly established figures in international art providing critical commentary on the work of their peers. The modernist model of the gadfly critic, an individual at sufficient remove from its object to make dispassionate and authoritative comment, seems itself more and more distant. Quaint, almost.

In that the practitioners of the new art criticism — which might be described, not entirely facetiously, as an ‘embedded criticism’ — are predominantly curators, the current tendency is not surprising, especially when viewed in light of the shifts in curatorial practice that have been under way since the late 1960s. Such shifts, particularly marked over the past two decades, are hardly news, as another well-known curator, Jens Hoffman noted in his own damning assessment of the Grand Tour, published in the September issue of Canadian Art. We have witnessed the rise of the ‘creative curator’, the ‘independent curator’, the ‘artist-curator’, and seen a fundamental desire on the part of curators to define and redefine the parameters of their own practice through endless panel discussions, symposia, conferences and entire academic courses and departments. In this context, the now-dominant model of the ‘critic-curator’, like its corollary the curator-critic, has gone, as Jennifer Allen observed recently in Frieze, largely unnoticed.

On the other hand, critics, Allen goes on to argue, are frequently called to account for their own death. Panel discussions on the ‘crisis in art criticism’ are just as prevalent at large scale art world gatherings as those on curatorial practice and the role of biennales. To go back a few years, at a symposium organised to contextualise Isobel Carlos’ On Reason and Emotion Biennale of Sydney in 2004, Terry Smith asked if biennales are “telling us more about the state of contemporary art than the writings of critics and historians”,  in grappling with issues “strenuously avoided” by an increasingly narrow and “largely promotional” art criticism. The gist of Smith’s contribution to the debate was that criticality or critical practices were no longer the purview of those who practised criticism as such, but were being articulated far more clearly in certain projects — and Smith was careful to point out precisely which projects — on the biennale circuit, a medium eminently better positioned by dint of its very form, to assess and convey the state of artistic practice in an age of globalised trade and communication networks. Against specialised criticism, an applied criticality.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems that Smith’s comments were already coming too late. To return to the trajectory of the practice of curatorship, the rise of independent curators and the proliferation of international biennales were distinctly 1990s phenomena; the last five years have seen many key figures from that period take up institutional posts—more often than not to contribute to what was being heralded two years ago as the 'new institutionalism'—while the biennale form has become increasingly imbricated with that of the art fair, the commercial interests, who Smith had believed were behind art criticism’s orientation toward public relations, were now firmly established in the international exhibition system. Smith, of course, had already suspected that the biennale might be “submitting itself to the reactionary, embattled and self-destructive tendencies that currently dominate the ‘culture at large’”. But it is not unremarkable that it took a mere three years for Enwezor, artistic director of documenta 11, one of the projects whose immense critical impact Smith was attempting to account for, to ask in the article that would raise Robert Storr’s ire: “Do the mordant and even hostile responses to this year’s Venice Biennale, documenta, and Skulptur Projekte Münster on the part of professionals and audiences alike signal that the paradigm of the large-scale show — which once represented a unique grammar of exhibition practice — has hit an iceberg and is about to sink?”

It is highly likely that due to their formal novelty, in concert with the uneven development of capital, the moment that the market’s penetration of large-scale exhibitions became as clear as it was in art publishing was simply delayed, and that the specific examples that Smith explored, rather than the initiating a trend that would dominate the decade, marked instead the culmination of a certain strand of 1990s exhibition practice. Regardless though, the question remains as to what becomes of criticality if it is no longer presented or even represented by either criticism or curatorial practice. The importance of biennales in this regard and their recurrence in debates on the state of criticism have issued not from their form, as such, but from their capacity to generate so much writing, both internally through their frequently expansive and often innovative catalogues, and externally by dint of their scale and prominence. But if Enwezor is right — and naturally Storr would argue that he isn’t — where might we locate criticality, if neither art publishing nor biennales, as market driven or just plain tired as they are, are capable of sustaining it? Or does the emergence of the figure of the embedded critic, essentially a synthesis of the curator and the critical writer, suggest a new modality for criticality itself?

These questions hinge on the issue of critical autonomy, both in the modernist sense of an independence supplied by distance, and in the activist sense of intervention into a prevailing discursive framework. If nothing else, the various accusations of self-interest emerging from the Artforum debate signal a collapse of critical distance, and the confusion of what and indeed who might constitute a prevailing framework. In his initial letter to the magazine, Storr described those professional colleagues offering negative criticism as ‘barely disguised rivals’, suggesting, quite strenuously, the potential for conflict of interest in wondering publicly if Jessica Morgan’s account of his exhibition was not “a kind of audition for the job”. With this gesture, Storr significantly problematised not just Morgan’s but every embedded critic’s capacity to deliver disinterested commentary, the ideology of pure criticism, when it is directed at the practices of other curators. That Jens Hoffman’s review in Canadian Art — which either went unnoticed or has not (yet) elicited a response from Storr — actually included something of a proposal for a Venice Biennale emphasises, as Jennifer Allen has also observed, a whole new system of considerations at work for the embedded critic, their peers and their audiences. Moreover, this new set of relationships reorders traditional conceptions of who exactly the figures of authority might be, a development attested to by the various claims and counter-claims throughout the Artforum correspondence of representing the ‘safe’, the ‘mainstream’ and ‘art-world business as usual’. The only distance left, it seems, is polemical. And that can get downright nasty.

The practice of criticism though, is by nature performative, an active engagement in an ongoing process of framing, of constructing meaning. And meaning, as Irit Rogoff reminds us, is never immanent, never lying in wait for some form of analysis to expose it. Rather, it takes place across a given temporality, in a transaction informed by and informing the flow of events. Rogoff identifies a three-fold movement in the development of the critical sensibility, from a notion embodying a position of distance from which to find fault according to a consensus of values, or to examine the logic of underlying assumptions, to an emergent mode of criticality premised on proximity that she describes appropriately as “an uncertain ground of actual embeddedness”, from which to “inhabit a problem”. In Rogoff’s terminology, this is a passage, one undertaken with remarkable speed in recent culture, from criticism in the first instance, to critique in the second, to an emergent mode of criticality, which “while building on critique wants nevertheless to inhabit culture in a relation other than one of critical analysis; other than one of illuminating flaws, locating elisions, allocating blames”. Certainly, this model does not exactly cohere with the various responses to Storr’s biennale, some of which were very harsh, but it does suggest that embedded criticism, as I have framed it along the lines of the critic-curator paradigm, is not irredeemably problematic and that more than simply desiring embeddedness, it extends from a position of being embedded a priori.

On this note I want to draw on the experience of working on a project, to which Lee Weng Choy has recently alluded in these pages—a small book published by Artspace (Sydney) of commissioned reviews of Zones of Contact, Charles Merewether’s 2006 Biennale of Sydney that I edited in collaboration with Natasha Bullock. In the introduction to that volume, we wrote:

The role of criticism is to provide an interruption, a questioning of the objects and events in our culture and society, to open a space for the transmission of ideas and provide a context for honest and productive discussion. At base it is a question of agency, a process of disalienation through which to actively participate in the running of everyday life.

As Lee pointed out in his talk ‘Biennale Demand’, reproduced in the last issue of Broadsheet; “Biennales and other such exhibitions are exemplary instances of the society of the spectacle.” Our publication was framed very much along the lines of such a recognition—not exactly as a platform from which to intervene in the unilateral flow of information, but more as a space for dialogue additional and to a large degree alternative to those already being provided by the biennale itself. If some of the considerations we assembled lacked a sense of professional ecology, as Lee pointed out in a review that appeared shortly after the book’s publication, then at least their positioning was informed by an understanding of the role of criticism as an active historical agent in the construction of the public sphere, and of the necessity for the creation of multiple platforms for engagement.

This is neither to attempt to justify nor offer an apology for any of the sometimes harsh judgments our volume may have offered (as well as those that were provoked in response); I have no desire to revisit a polemic that, to all intents and purposes, never really took place (and which, in light of the increasingly ad hominem missives appearing in Artforum, is all the better for not having taken place). Rather, I want to stress that the two conceptions of critical autonomy offered above should not be confused; that the erroneousness of modernity’s isolation of aesthetic developments from other spheres of human experience, and of its corollary notion of isolated positions from which to assess such developments, not reduce the very real necessity for creating platforms other than those provided by prevailing frameworks, a necessity felt not just in art but in all aspects of collective life. It is with such a consideration that the two poles of biennale discourse sketched by Lee in his caricature, the affirmative in which “the space between thinking and selling collapses” and the dismissive whose “collapse is between knowledge and despair”, might be negotiated.

The uncertain ground of embedded criticism, a modality that is not simply desirable but actual for art professionals today, is one of reflexivity and accountability, a criticality built on self-criticality aware of its role and responsibility in the construction and ultimately, the struggle over meaning. It is this dialectical understanding of criticality that in the 1990s enabled the strategic use of biennales and increasingly in the past decade, other artistic institutions — and by this I mean not only museums and galleries, but universities, publications and so on — as critical platforms, in spite of their myriad problematics.

But is this the only location for critical practice? Is there not the potential for the rearticulation of political and cultural power to translate into the language of power? After all, if Hoffman could call Art Unlimited at Art Basel the European summer’s “most interesting large-scale display of contemporary art”, then the critical potential of large-scale exhibitions is up for serious reassessment, especially as we head into an unprecedented season of biennales and triennials across the Asia-Pacific. Moreover, we have to ask what the trajectory of this critical potential with regard to biennale-form, as with that of art publishing before it, means for the ‘new institutions’ and their constituents.

In closing, I want to take the liberty of quoting at length from the final document issued by the Copenhagen Free University, a self-organised public institution that opened in the private space of the home of artists Henriette Heise and Jakob Jakobsen in early 2001. Finding itself more and more integrated into the machinery of a cultural economy it had been established to circumvent, and having experimented with the platforms provided by biennales and bricks-and-mortar institutions alike, the Copenhagen Free University took the course of de-institutionalising, electing to abolish itself altogether and cease all activity conducted in its name at the end of 2007. Their closing statement is presented both as a radical alternative to the decidedly privileged debate being played out in Artforum, and to emphasise temporality and sociality as necessary complements to the ideals of reflexivity, accountability and professional ecology of embedded criticality, if it is to avoid becoming one more sophisticated apology for spectacular consumption:

One thing is the fact that a self-instituted university is messing around with the institutional power relations. But on a structural level the question is what conceptions of knowledge are actually pervading the self-institution? Knowledge for us has always been something that is evaporating, slipping between our fingers. It is not something that we treat as a truth or a possession but something living, a relation between people. Truth is always the truth of the masters; the proprietary knowledge is always the knowledge that separates people into those who possess and those who don’t. Knowledge for us is always situated and interweaved with desire. The kitchen, the bed, the living room made up our anything-but- sterile laboratories. Dreams, unhappiness, rage were all over the architecture. Knowledge is at the same time about empowerment, making people able to understand and act closer to existence and despite the distortion of the spectacle. The research projects we initiated worked as invitations to share rather than drives to accumulate. There have been no singular end products; of importance were all the various experiences and conclusions that people carried into their own lives and networks after taking part in the activities at the CFU. This is why we haven’t published papers or dissertations to wrap up the research projects that we have worked with. We found that the research and the knowledge spun at the CFU did not need a closure. But the institution did.  The Copenhagen Free University has never wanted to become a fixed identity and as a part of the concept of self-institutionalisation we have always found it important to take power and play with power but also to abolish power. This is why the Copenhagen Free University closed down at the end of 2007. Looking back at the six years of existence of the CFU we end our activities with a clear conviction and declare: We Have Won!

If Guy Debord is invoked in all sorts of contexts these days, institutional and otherwise, with varying degrees of understanding — and by mentioning the spectacle how can we not invoke him? — then it is worth at least doing him the service of quoting him word for word. “In the language of contradiction”, he wrote at the apogee of his theoretical lucidity, proposing a critical language that embodied its own critique, “the critique of culture is a unified critique, in that it dominates the whole of culture—its knowledge as well as its poetry—and in that it no longer separates itself from the critique of the social totality”.

Part II of this essay is here.

Four long paragraphs on Teppei Kaneuji

This text is exactly what it says it is. It was commissioned for Broadsheet (volume 40, issue 1, March 2011, pp. 36-8) for Teppei's participation in the 2011 Singapore Biennale. It has all the hallmarks of SNRI withdrawals. I think I wrote most of it in a park.

Then, I remembered something that I had once seen on a snowy day: a Mercedes Benz next to a pile of dog shit, both of them covered in snow. At first I thought that the juxtaposition of the two made the scene interesting, but I soon realised that wasn’t the reason. What made it interesting was that two completely different things were unified under the same surface.
—Teppei Kaneuji

Let’s think about abstraction for a moment. Let’s think about the point of it — point in the double sense of the term, point as purpose and locus. What is the point of abstraction and at what point does it occur? Because when you think about it, abstraction — and we’re talking about art here, or at least art is around here somewhere — is a rather non-specific term, abstract even. Who does the abstracting exactly? The artist, the viewer, the work? Abstraction, art-historically understood, is relative only to pictorial convention. The notion also says a lot about the lofty role afforded vision in the hierarchy of the senses, abstraction being the shortened form of visual abstraction, according to which the term abstraction, used in proximity to the term art, always infers the visual. When was the last time you heard an abstract sound, breathed an abstract scent, savoured an abstract taste or fondled an abstract surface? Limited to the realm of the visual, abstraction is almost always counterpoised to representation, such that abstraction is defined as its other. A work of art, at least what we can see of it, is either representational or it is abstract, it either depicts something or not. Fair enough. But what, you might ask, of presentational art? Fair enough, too, but it is hardly appreciated in quite the same way. Presentational art exceeds the visual, introduces all those other pesky senses, and even the other, unofficial ones, temporality, movement and so on. Presentational art disrupts the hierarchy of the senses, scrambles it senselessly into nonsense, so that there is only sense. Even abstraction holds no relevance in corporeal reality; vision can only re-establish its eminence, and thus that of abstraction, by representing presentation. But where and why? Which brings us back to the point, or points, as it were, of abstraction. To sidestep the question once more, what of abstract ideas? Can an abstract idea not be expressed through art? And if expression seems too old fashioned, then communicated, suggested, proposed, speculated upon or provoked? But then the work is not the idea, but its medium. The idea is not presented, but represented. Conceptual abstraction, then, is representational. So we have two forms of abstraction — abstract art and abstract ideas. So what is/are the point/s? Who abstracts what? And why? Vision approaching presentation, perhaps? Nursing a secret aspiration to the purity of precritical compulsion, presentation’s prerepresentational expression, but on its own terms? The quest for a universal language, or better — as vision always aspires to go one better — for universal meaning? Where and when do these desires appear, who is party to the exchange, and why, oh why, do they attach themselves to art? These questions need another tangent.

So let’s think about design. Let’s think about the arrangement of visual devices that knows what it’s doing. Let’s think about abstraction with a purpose. Why abstraction, you ask? Because abstraction is frequently dismissed as design. You’ve heard the remark; possibly even made it yourself. But unlike abstraction, design is so self-assured it doesn’t need to represent. Or to not represent. There is no dichotomy of representation and abstraction, only the two poles of function and desire. Design can render the functional desirable and the desirable functional. It can happily steal our dreams, remould them into attractive shapes and shades, and sell them back to us. With a healthy mark-up, of course (otherwise why would you bother, eh?). The generic to the generic, the cosmopolitan to the cosmopolitan, with all manner of mentorships in taste and the lack thereof available to those who aspire to them (or not). It presses difference into the service of equivalence, an equivalence it takes to be universal, based not on anything so pretentious, precritical, prerepresentational as language or meaning, but on the universal mediator, the gold standard, money baby, quantifying and rationalising all that comes before it, even at the behest of the most senseless or insensitive twitching of the sexual organs, made sensible as the sex appeal of the organic, giving full meaning to the term commodity fetishism. And while like presentation it has no need of sensory hierarchies, it never forgets to flatter vision, for vision is its vainglorious benefactor. Here’s to keeping up appearances! Here’s to the proliferation of objects that will not only make life simpler, but which, like well-raised children, will also be noticeable when required and fade into the background when not. Objects that will make us better people. For all this, there is nothing inherently wrong about design, just as there is nothing inherently right about art. Art might lack design’s assurances, but both are just as capable of being reassuring. Design is an extraordinary human faculty, possessed of the capacity to make the products of human labour, and indeed that labour itself, more efficient, more sustainable, more productive. If we were to define it along the lines of Marx, Franklin and Arendt’s homo faber it is the process by which humans improve the products that differentiate them from all other forms of life. This would be the meaning of culture. The more anthropological account of the homo ludens, as expressed by Mauss, Levi-Strauss and Huizinga, among others, would see humans as the perfectors of ever more intricate games in politics, law, warfare and love. This would be the meaning of labour. But to design is not only to improve, but also to designate. There is a neatness to design, a typological imperative, that seems to belie its talent for channelling excess. Design can only ever be associated with excess; it can never be excessive. It needs to name, to measure, to quantify. Any excess it invokes or provokes can always be counted. Even the term ‘overdesign’ designates a reduction of functionality or return. One can utilise a designed object with an excess of force, but that object in and of itself contains no such force; it remains a technology. If we were to appeal to the universal equivalence then when it comes to the question of art and design, we might see that excess is the price of assurance and purpose. Design has a point; abstraction does not, which is precisely the point.

Let’s think about installation, if only because it allows us to draw back a little, to stop staring so intently at objects and take into account all those other pesky senses. Smell something, step in something. Twitch. Maybe space and time have something to tell us. Q: What’s the difference between a Mercedes Benz and a pile of dog shit? A: That’s not the point. As Boris Groys reminds us, for all the dominance of the art market over the production and circulation of art—and, though Groys doesn’t mention it, the production and circulation of publicity surrounding art—the form under which art is most frequently encountered today is installation. It is also the form under which the artist assumes the greatest sovereignty, transcending, however momentarily, the rational-critical public-sphere ideology of the modernist white cube to take control of the process of making decisions about what is included and in what fashion. This authority for a process appropriated from curators with their public accountabilities by artists with no such accountabilities amounts to a temporary privatisation of public space. Here, the exhibition itself becomes a medium, one that no longer relies on the primacy of the visual for its legitimation as art­ — rather it is its performativity as installation that now takes on this function — and its designation as one kind of art or other. Perhaps this is why the broad emergence of installation at the very point of the exhaustion of postmodern pictorial strategies so often found representation and abstraction — in the sense of an arrested, immobile, visually perceptible and analysable non-representation — deployed not in dichotomous or rhetorical relation to one another, but as so many performative modalities among others. If such work maintains fidelity to anything, it is not visual language as such — there is no signifying or non-signifying gesture, or even one that might attempt to signify everything, or worse, to be everything — but the material and its organisation in space, its role in mediating the relationship between the human body and a given set of structures. Faktura and tektonika are the double terms of the installational turn, and their relationship to each other is dialectical. No mutual exclusions here. Interestingly, subsequent trends in art production, most notably video, have taken place within rather than against installation. So even if reproductive technologies have returned questions of representation to the neat formalist dialectic of faktura and tektonika, they have done so in accordance with its presentational logic, its production of a mode of spectatorship qualitatively distinct to the modular ocularcentricity of the modernist white cube. This is the mode of spectatorship that requires of the viewer an awareness of their own corporeality, their own weight and movement, their finitude and libidinality, their completion of the work, their agency in entering or leaving it, in submitting, however paradoxically, to the sovereignty of the artist. Oh, what Sade could do for contemporary theory, when the sovereign could just as happily assume the role of subject! Have we digressed far enough yet?

So now that we’ve had a chance to think about all that, let’s think about Teppei Kaneuji. Because Teppei Kaneuji is the real subject of this essay (and as such has assumed a subjective position in any case). The long paragraphs above on abstraction, design and installation were completely disingenuous. Know that. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course; they were carried out with Kaneuji’s work in mind. It’s simply that with another artist in mind, they may have been carried out differently. Indeed, with another artist in mind, they may well have not come together in the same combination at all. Because there are three integrated strategies that appear in Kaneuji’s practice, which we will term, for the sake of whatever clarity we can muster, as overabstraction, redesign and apoinstallation. We can locate Kaneuji within a strand of Japanese practice that begins with the highly influential though still underexamined Kodai Nakahara, and continues through Kenji Yanobe and Takashi Murakami to Kaneuji’s magpie peers in exonemo, Paramodel, Hiraku Suzuki, Koki Tanaka and Ujino. Or, for Australian audiences, we can see parallels with the ludic, open-ended installation of Hany Armanious, Mikala Dwyer, Christopher Hanrahan, Koji Ryui or Huseyin Sami. Or we can call on surrealist juxtaposition, cubist collage, nouveau realisme, affichisme, neo-Dada and simulationism to understand what he’s playing at, or Kaneuji’s personal heroes Fischli and Weiss, Christian Marclay and Tim Hawkinson. But beyond a catalogue of names, clarity can be aided by description, and Kaneuji’s methodology is helpful here. In his most representative creations, Kaneuji works by accumulating a vast array of objects, sourced from hardware stores, toyshops and variety markets, the more functional and precise in their design the better. Their utility is then discarded, with the objects being organised into such categories as ‘things that look like bones’, ‘things that can be piled up high’, ‘things that have space inside them’ and ‘transparent things’, that is, according to their materiality and potentiality. These things become the base elements of new constellations and constructions, the struts, cantilevers and minarets of totem poles, towers and winter gardens, whatever we think we can find in Kaneuji’s extraordinary assemblages. And all is unified, obliterated and coated in a monochromatic sludge, a pigmented resin that hardens in drips and flows, which is both allusive and non-descript, which approaches the condition of contemporary revisions of minimalism — Peter Robinson comes to mind  here — signifying nothing but never closing itself off completely to metaphor. But what is design without function? Pure desire? Or baseless desire, in which sense we would find a desire without foundation and without limit, a desire that could just as easily be nothing as it could be everything, or more radically, more subversively, a design and a desire utterly indifferent to quantification? For our purposes, in thinking through Kaneuji, in attempting to gather our thoughts in encountering his work, an encounter which takes place as and in and through installation, with all the sexual politics on which this encounter relies, design would thus be abstraction with a purpose but without a function, purposeful desire or desiring purpose, in any case desire detached from utility, not by chance but by design. This is the beauty of Kaneuji’s Borgesian typology, which attempts to designate, to design, not what is but what could be. This is redesignation, redesign. Objects accumulated for the sole purpose of being covered in viscous, libidinal gunk. Objects whose obliteration of function does not equal an obliteration of being. They are abstract, useless and assured. This is an excess of abstraction, an excess of uselessness: overabstraction. Overabstraction is the abstraction that obliterates representation and ideas. It requires neither but demands both. The point is the radical reordering of perceptual categories, radical insofar as it goes to the root of things, where the root is the potentiality of materials. A Mercedes Benz and a pile of dog shit hold in common the capacity to be covered by snow. That is the excessive double point of abstraction, or the point/s of overabstraction, which has no need prerepresentational purity, of linguistic and semantic universality, because its unity is always to come, always elsewhere, always elsewhen. A Kaneuji installation is apoinstallational because of the sense it produces in time and space of this elsewhere in time in space. That’s the point, and it points away. To leap to the furthest point of our digression, then what might be, what might be to come, what it might be to come, is the point where sovereignty and subjecthood are no longer defined by the separation of bodies, but are bound by an interchangability whose mediating tension is as libidinal as it is dialectical. We are bodies that might be covered in snow.

Darkness in the dark: Tragedy and paradox in the work of Ahmet Öğüt

This piece was the catalogue essay (of sorts) for an exhibition I put together with Ahmet Öğüt for Artspace, Sydney, in 2010. It was actually written to be read aloud with slides, which I planned to do when the exhibition traveled to Adelaide, but my daughter decided to bring her birth forward a few weeks. In the end neither Ahmet nor I could travel to the show, so Melanie Oliver stepped in and apparently did a brilliant job for both of us. The exhibition itself was called 'Speculative Social Fantasies', after a text that Pelin Tan had written on Ahmet's work for Art Papers. My essay was originally published in issue 8 of Column (Artspace, 2011, pp. 30-5), and also appeared in truncated form in the exhibition brochure produced by the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia.

We see planes. Military planes. An array of them, corralled into a vast grid that seems to stretch all the way back to the mountain range rising abruptly behind it. This is one of the famed aeroplane graveyards we might recall from their numerous representations within popular culture. Shot as a long, scrolling dolly from the window of a vehicle driven with remarkable steadiness, Ahmet Öğüt’s Things we count (2008) attempts to account for this extraordinary landscape, which the famously mobile artist came across in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. The last drops of a receding thunderstorm periodically spatter and blur the lens, with the camera’s focal length drawn so long that they can only be seen after they have hit. Their arrival registers sharply, like a jump cut, or a cigarette burnt into the surface of a frame of film. From the gallery, the lens assumes its materiality, becoming a form whose physicality can be detected by the way the raindrops cling and stream.

Materially it is glass, it tells us that we are watching something — we know that this is a video; we know a camera was involved in its production; we are made complicit, rather than simply interpolated, in the exchange of showing and looking. Metaphorically, it is a windowpane, and we know from Walter Benjamin, who gleaned it from Andre Breton, that ‘the first glance through the rain-blurred window of a new apartment’ conceals a certain revolutionary energy, ‘immense forces of “atmosphere” that might be brought ‘to the point of explosion’. The streets in this city we look out onto are composed negatively, in the spaces between dormant aeroplanes; they seem to confirm, in the most literal manner, the assertions of the Invisible Committee—those anonymous partisans of explosion—that ‘The armed forces don‘t simply adapt to the metropolis, they produce it'. The city is no longer bound to its ancient opposition to the country: ‘All territory is subsumed by the metropolis. Everything occupies the same space, if not geographically then through the intermeshing of its networks.’

We cannot deny the fascination this spectacle of surplus hardware holds for us; its strangeness and its awesome potentiality are enervating. In recalling his days in the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell wrote of field-guns, lashed to the open trucks of a troop-train of men from the International Column, making his heart leap ‘as guns always do’, of ‘that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war is glorious after all’. But these are planes in disuse, a kind of forced hibernation. Staring blindly forward, with their cockpit windows covered, they take on the melancholy air of masked birds of prey or blinkered horses. A single cloud from the ebbing storm hangs above a gap in the mountains to the top right of the frame as if to underline this tragic sensibility. Are these not weapons? Do they not have the potential to kill, maim and dispossess, or at least to aid, significantly, in the mechanised process of killing, maiming and dispossessing, an operation that is in its essence a political one? And in their very dormancy, are they not symbols of a vast surplus of production, both fueled by, and geared toward, the expropriation and exploitation of bodies, resources and vital energies? Why should we ever feel sorry for planes? How do we make sense of this emotion?

In this tragic paradox lies the singular richness of Öğüt’s work, and the appropriateness of the artist’s decision to title this particular selection Speculative Social Fantasies. For the notion of a speculative fantasy is itself tragic — as speculation, it is pure fantasy, which is to say that of all possible futures, it is the one that won‘t eventuate; while as fantasy, its speculative character implies that it will never escape the space of the real. Perhaps this paradox, cast back onto the realm of the social, defines the limits of possibility of the world in which we live, the very world whose absurd logic and occasional wonders Öğüt’s work so frequently exposes through its subtle perceptual shifts and keenly observed re-framings.

Paradox, of course, is the unstable foundation on which all of Western philosophy teeters — or at least this is how Boris Groys has formulated it. The embrace of contradiction at the heart of all language distinguishes philosophy from the logical pretences of sophistry and politics. In exposing the contradictions hidden at the dark core of the smooth, coherent speech of the sophists while offering no logical proposition of his own, Socrates attests to the paradoxical composition of all discourse and hence makes paradox his point of departure. This is the secret methodology of every ‘true’ philosopher to work within the Platonic tradition, culminating in the traumatic radicality of Derrida, for whom paradox radiates not from reason, but from its Other. It is toward an encounter with this Other of unreason that against all reason deconstruction strives, knowing that this encounter is ultimately unreasonable and unachievable, because ‘it is impossible to see darkness in the dark’.

So says Groys. As metaphor, this is remarkably ocularcentric. For might the denial of vision not heighten our senses to the heavy breathing of this Other? To the sweet pungency that permeates our nostrils and coats the backs of our tongues, the sharp pain we encounter when we stumble over it, or the confusing pleasure we feel in its sweaty embrace? We'd be like blind men with an elephant, for sure, but the whole point of philosophy is not to claim we know the beast, only to reflect on the experience of grasping and caressing its leathery trunk, its leg or its tail. In fact, let’s forget what the Other might be altogether and concentrate on what it might do. What if it tries to elude us, to attack us, to ravish us? What if it simply remains indifferent to us? Now that would be truly traumatic. And what, in our self-consciousness, in our tragic, never-ending quest for unobtainable wisdom, would we do if this other were to crack a joke?

Might this be the terrible possibility Öğüt entertains in his work? That the Other might be laughing at our expense, that this is the root of our fears? Could the Other really be so funny? At least we know that Öğüt himself is funny, whether he occupies the position of the other or not. Why else would he leave paradox lying around a darkened room for Derrida to trip over? Now that would be a sight gag — if only we had sight. Naturally, we would feel for Derrida, a charming, generous fellow in his lifetime; we certainly wouldn’t wish him physical harm. And no doubt Derrida would have seen the humour in it all — having spent a lifetime seeking the irrational Other precisely on the basis that it could not be found, he encounters it in the clumsiest and most corporeal way possible. Who knew that in the sphere of critical modes, slapstick and deconstruction would be separated by only the smallest degree of hermeneutic arc?

It is this charismatically subversive sensibility, at once darkly humorous and profoundly empathetic, that characterises Öğüt's wry artistic propositions for daily life. In Öğüt's work, the world is a panoply of gags just waiting to be discovered. All it takes is coming to terms with the tragedy and paradox of existence; only then can speculative social fantasy be understood as a force, which is to say, as a potentiality — it is the real that will not be realised, but can be. Even if this limits it to the realm of ideology — and whether it does or not depends on your understanding of subjectivity — it maintains a material force.

The first thing you should know about Öğüt's sense of humour is that it is deadly serious. His videos, photographs, drawings, actions, installations and publications are populated by the most serious of characters — cops, terrorists, stone-throwing youths, bomb-disposal robots, high-ranking officials of every stripe. They cover the trauma of guerrilla warfare, paraphernalia of public security, the politics of currency exchange, geographies of human movement, and the power of institutions, both social and cultural. The form that they take is doubly serious, for Öğüt rejects even the already solemn medium of documentary exposition in favour of an approach informed by conceptual art and its legacies, the tendency within contemporary art which so rigorously takes its own status as art into account that it must surely operate as the most serious of presentational modes.

But for all its seriousness, Öğüt's work is never earnest. Earnestness fixes seriousness and play as two distinct and opposing modalities; Öğüt’s sense of humour allows for no such contrast. Its operation recalls the fluid relationship between seriousness and play that Johan Huizinga identified in children’s games — and at the roots of Western culture — where ‘the consciousness of play being “only a pretend” does not by any means prevent it from proceeding with the utmost seriousness, with an absorption, a devotion that passes into rapture and, temporarily at least, completely abolishes the troublesome “only” feeling.’ Here, we might substitute ‘only a pretend’ for ‘only joking’, for like the best of jokers, Öğüt endeavours to construct a point of identification for his audience, to allow them to participate in the foibles of his actors, even to see such shortcomings in themselves, and to do so happily. Like Chaplin, Keaton or Tati, the artist frequently appears in his own works, undertaking absurd and self-deprecating actions — ‘punch this painting’ implores a recent self-portrait; you too can risk arrest to turn a Toyota into a police cruiser for no reason, suggests Somebody Else’s Car (2005). This isn’t just comedic classicism. By not excluding the possibility of being the butt of his own joke, Öğüt only underlines the joke’s empathic function and broadens its potential appeal. Such jokes are shared and never traded.

As with the best jokes, Öğüt’s works operate irruptively and iteratively. This is to say, that they are at once temporary invasions of social consciousness by its repressed, and transpositions of the power of the irruptive moment onto the listener. To put it another way, the joke is a means by which we convince someone that a thought that has occurred to us is funny, that it momentarily reconfigures acceptable patterns of cognition and behaviour, and we do this by articulating that thought in a way that simulates for the listener the force of the thought’s irruption from our subconscious. Numerous strategies — timing, rhythm, plot, characterisation — are put into motion to achieve this. Success of the joke depends not only on the listener ‘getting' the joke and finding it funny enough to laugh, but also on the transformation of the listener into the teller through the jokes repetition and embellishment, which further underlines an identification between the experience of listening and the occurrence of the irruptive thought. The joke is thus the reiterative transfer of the social repressed, the operative flipside of dramatic tragedy, whose historical function was to legitimise the event as history. But for all its transferable capacity to reorder social ego — its potentiality — the joke is limited to the field of the ‘only joking', even if it does proceed with the utmost seriousness. The repressed idea only arrives in consciousness on the condition that it is only a joke, a kind of temporary entry visa that comes with an extensive set of restrictions.

What an unfunny definition of the joke! What a verbose and overly analytic disservice to such vibrant work! Perhaps Guy Hocquenghem approximates the operation of Öğüt’s humour better when he observes that writing ‘gets as close to madness as it can without ever entering into it for fear of ceasing to communicate', that ‘for madness to be transmitted, it must be put to reason, that is, prison', that he who succeeds in communicating ‘is a cop, and a cop that doubles as a transvestite... wearing garters concealed beneath the pants of his uniform!' This is a far more appropriate image, far closer to some of the ubuesque police, politicians, soldiers, clerics, businessmen and Mafiosos who inhabit Öğüt's works. And it is closer again to the tragic paradox of speculative social fantasy.

Is conceptual art just the austere uniform under which Öğüt sports his garters? Only to the degree that the art world needs to know that madness is art before it can fully embrace it. For Öğüt, conceptual art itself is already awash with deviancy. Take the works that open Speculative Social Fantasies, which might be read as reiterations of some of the best jokes to emerge from the advanced art of the 1970s. Send him your money (2010) is a reasonably straightforward ‘cover’ of Chris Burden's 1979 hour-long radio broadcast imploring listeners that their donations would ‘make a lot of difference’, albeit read in Öğüt’s Turkish accent, the artist substituting his own Amsterdam address for Burden's. The work plays on an old transistor radio animated by a small FM transmitter secreted behind a wall. Guppy 13 vs Ocean Wave — a Bas Jan Ader Experience (2010) is a single-channel video documenting a participatory work in which Öğüt invited viewers to complete Bas Jan Ader's fatal trans-Atlantic voyage in a replica of Ader's yellow, thirteen-foot sailboat that Öğüt had secured from a collector in the United States, complete with a copy of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind to accompany the triumphant arrival into Amsterdam’s waters. Burden and Ader are hardly the dowdiest of precursors; such is their idiosyncrasy that one imagines a survey of conceptualism curated by Öğüt — no doubt also including other baroques like Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Julius Koller, Mladen Stilinovic — bearing the subtitle A history of dumb ideas.

In any case, the most perverted aspect of Hocquenghem's image is not what is being repressed, but the mere fact of repression itself. Thus the cruel irony of the joke, that its irruptive function, which constitutes its very meaning, can only be such in the context of repression. Without repression there is no irruption, nothing to irrupt, Öğüt seems aware of this irony, an irony as frustrating as, but not identical to, the ‘troublesome “only” feeling' described by Huizinga. One need only spend a minute watching the short loop of his Light Armoured (2006), in which a military vehicle remains disconcertingly unaffected by rocks tossed at it from just out of view. Is there a better metaphor for the effectiveness of political art?

And yet on he presses, proceeding with the utmost seriousness, because art never functions as a case of straightforward oppositionality in any case. Here we need to return to Things we count, arguably Öğüt's most iconic, but least funny work. How to deal with the tragic paradox that lies at the scenario’s heart? With the collocation of fascination and horror, or better, because horror is fascinating after all, the confusion of ethical assumptions by a symbolic field that would purport to represent them, the mechanised, militarised sublime as irresolvable trauma? Like repeating to oneself, Last House on the Left style, ‘It’s only a movie, it’s only a movie’, we count. We count to reduce the things in front of us to mere things (and thankfully, they no longer possess the power to reduce us to mere things). We count to create silences to punctuate with our counting, percussive and regular, an aural approximation of the modernist grid lain over the desert. We count to create vacuums, gaps in the vast armoury before us. This is the simple power of the voice, the power of the voice that refuses to be silenced in the face of the awesome exercise of power — even if nothing is accomplished, something has still been said.

Thus the artist's fascination with the group of boys combining the games of football and chicken on a darkened stretch of road, pursuing their game at the risk of life and limb, and thus their capacity to pursue the game at all, a game whose real beauty can only be illuminated by the lights of the next car that would temporarily shut it down, or, depending on levels of skill, gall or dumb luck, render it existentially unplayable — the game takes on meaning precisely because of the presence of risk. Sure, no cars will be destroyed. Sure, young lives may well be. But a degree of autonomy is created all the same, however fleeting.

A simple sign, which Öğüt positions in such a way as to not be mistaken for art — think about it — puts this more literally. ‘This area is under 23 hour video and audio surveillance’, it proclaims in no-nonsense Helvetica. Power is everywhere, Öğüt has observed, but not without its gaps and slippages. The precise location of these gaps and slippages is open to question. Note that the sign does not divulge precisely for which hour, due to budget cuts or bureaucratic oversight, the space is left unsurveyed, or indeed, if the audio-visually unregistered hour is continuous or cumulative. But if speculative fantasy can accomplish anything, it will locate them and, with a little prodding, make them that tiny bit wider.