With a degree in Fine Art the world’s my oyster!!
Monika Sosnowska untitled, 2006.
Monika Sosnowska (floor, foreground), Georg Herold (cases), Maarten Baas (floor, left), Martin Boyce (hidden, left), Andreas Slominski (top of door frame and left on the back wall), Spartacus Chetwynd (floor, middle background), Tony Conrad (back wall, right), Michael Fullerton (plinth, right), Abraham Cruzvillegas (hangin, in background), Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij (midground, middle)
Although it’s not clear if this is a direct response to Lyotard’s exploration of his work (Lyotard, 1979; Lyotard, 1981) Buren made his own statement about why he produces texts and what purposes these texts serve.
This piece, Why Write? comes across as almost reductively prosaic in its presentation of the facts of writing that Buren considers relevant. The types of writing that he undertakes are literally enumerated and defined: 1 Necessity, 2 Urgency, 3 Reflection, 4 Commissions, and, 5 Pleasure.
He states that “what a visual work has to ‘say,’ if anything, cannot be reduced to any other ‘saying.’” (Buren, 1982, p.109) The act of writing and its remnant, the text, are disabused of the function of complementing the work of art, in the way I believe Lyotard proposes for Buren’s work.
My writing shouldn’t obscure the fact that my main activity is tied to the ambition of making visible the “not-yet-seen”: the two activities can neither be isolated or confused. Although one has the mad desire of flushing out the “not-yet-seen,” the other could never aspire to express the “not-yet-said.” (Buren, 1982, p.108)
The function of the writing for Buren is to act as a sort of testing ground for the work of art. In Buren’s case, at least, the work of art is (textually?) “silent” – the writings about them act as a “baptism of fire” (à la Nietszche?) from which the effective work of art will emerge unscathed:
… only those which can emerge intact or reinforced manage to prove that they have something to “say” beyond the written word. (Buren, 1982, p.109)
This seems to suggest a necessary synergy between the work and the text, that the text serves to justify and promote the work to a new state. However, the text is never the artwork in a very real sense – the difference between the artwork and writing is described as “the uncrossable and impossible distance between the two ways of saying.” (Buren, 1982, p.109)
He finishes by making the pointed remark that “if I put time and care into my writing, it’s because I feel that words have a certain strength, and their power shouldn’t be monopolised by so-called specialists.” (Buren, 1982, p.109) Exactly who he is directing this to is unclear, but I can believe it could easily be towards Lyotard’s co-option of his work.
I suspect that Buren is talking about his artworks in-particular, rather than about art in general here. He may also be reacting to some other critic, I don’t know the context of the piece, Buren may have had many critics in mind, Lyotard may be completely irrelevant here. But I think Buren’s conception of writing is an interesting adjunct to his work and obviously provides some useful background to it.
Some might say that in the transformed conditions of the present [Institutional Critique] has become an academic exercise, a genre, or worse, a style. Completely recuperated. This is undoubtedly true of certain cases. But such a judgment rests on an understanding of avant-gardism that is no longer operative, perhaps no longer desirable. And the contemporary situation doesn’t obviate all communicative, critical practices. There are significant ways in which work formerly known as Institutional Critique has been transformed and thus continued in the present. (Baker, 2001, p.220)
I’ve yet to visit this show myself, so the following may seem quite harsh given I have no personal experience of the projects, but these are just my initial thoughts, reflecting a review and information from the show’s website.
Apropos my continuing investigations into (the state of) institutional critique, I came cross a review of the RCA MA in Curating Contemporary Art, entitled Various Small Fires. The review was posted on Art Reviews’ mySpace blog, by James Westcott (aside: I have a real problem with the fact that mySpace layouts look awful in the Safari browser, to the extent that I think it reflects really badly on any site using this service. But getting back to my original subject . . .).
Towards the end of his review, James Westcott critically contrasts this set of fledgling curators’ efforts with those of previous graduates of the course. And not only their peers but also other artists who have worked in the same space or with the same ‘material’.
Initially, though, he makes the connection with Yves Klein’s Le Vide, the empty gallery as void as object to be displayed, undoubtedly a seminal piece for the practice of institutional critique, and one which the present set of curators are perhaps being unfairly compared to. I don’t think there’s much to gain using Klein as a point of comparison for any recent curators, especially given the actual content of the current RCA degree show. While you can’t get away from the knowledge of Klein’s act, there’s been so much water under the bridge since then that I don’t think it’s possible to extricate these current examples from every other influence that has appeared since Klein.
The introduction to the show from the RCA website aligns itself with a practice very much concerned with the physical spaces involved:
The exhibition hinges on the use of the galleries’ architecture and what emerges through the bare coexistence of the different artworks. Another concern of ours has been to expose the galleries’ interior architecture . . . 1
And as Westcott highlights, this is an ambivalent solution:
Reacting to the given space is an elegant solution to the potential organizational and aesthetic problems of a group of curators (all of them with something to say and something to prove) putting together a group show. But it is just that: a solution, a kind of expedience, rather than a demonstration of inspiration, or an assertion of something.2
I also wonder how this is in any way radical? The obvious rejoinder to that question would be, why should it be radical at all, and what would ‘radical’ look like in this context?
The “bare coexistence” mentioned in the introduction to the website just seems to be a license absolving the curators of any requirement to assert their own presence with the works they’ve picked – although that’s perhaps not what one would want anyway, it’s a common complaint to say that the curator has hijacked a particular show of another artist’s works.
Well, perhaps this license allows them the freedom to depart from any over-bearing structure of narrative and theme, but where does that leave us? I’m left wondering what this adds to discourses which took place in the 90’s, which dealt with apparently similar concerns?
Must find out more . . .
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