metropolis m

There’s a famous and rather exquisite Chris Marker quote suggesting that gods and heroes have sought asylum in art collections, like political refugees in foreign embassies. Or something to that effect. I’ve heard the phrase in very different contexts, but never sourced or referenced. It seems more or less clear what the maxim says about the heroes, now dethroned and beleaguered. What it says about art collections is more delicate. One is invited to imagine an ambassadorial kind of place, replete with technocrats and alcoholics, tax-free cigars and cadeaux diplomatiques. An exceptional place where the rule of law is suspended. A true shelter, threatened only by the occasional Iranian undergrad with a testosterone problem. What becomes of the heroes in such a place? Huddled in a haze of cigar smoke and good cognac, they in turn become ambassadorial. And yet, by virtue of their previous, amazing lifestyles, they remain simpatico. Still crazy after all these years. In my last column, I mentioned the careers of two unpredictable men who might have been expected to abandon the confines of an institution at the drop of a hat. Yet both these men ended up not only defending their foreign embassies with much pathos and belligerence, they even institutionalized one new profession each: Adorno, that of the critical theorist; Dominique Vivant Denon, that of the curator. The zeal of Denon is especially striking, given that he spent most of his life being so badass, but this reputational flickering between the impish and the genteel has remained the stuff of curators to this day. Consider Christian Rattemeyer’s fantastic study on When Attitudes Become Form and Op Losse Schroeven, which compares two analogous group exhibitions in 1969. The historiographic success of Harald Szeeman’s version is contrasted with Wim Beeren’s muted reception today. As the study suggests, much of Szeeman’s radiance can be traced back to a combination of both ‘adventurousness’ and ‘inclusiveness’. Some would imagine the adventurous or experimental to be anathema to the inclusive and encyclopaedic, but if you categorize the experimental, and experiment with your categories, you’re onto a winner. Again, the two temperaments do not negate so much as inform and co-opt one another. Much of this is reminiscent of New Institutionalism and similar lines of thought that uphold the programmatic acceptance of experimentation, critique and antagonism as part of a venue’s modus operandi. A helpful conceptual pointer here is philosopher Chantal Mouffe’s idea of ‘agonism’ – the notion that, in any process worthy of the term ‘political’, conflict and confusion do not represent exceptional crises, but standard, essential ingredients a priori. Agonism aside, the arts have long developed a preference for ‘a’-words marking various shades of undecidability: ambivalence, abeyance, aporia, ambiguity, antagonism and so on. It’s obvious that ‘a’-words are quite helpful as adjectives, and that New Institutionalist versatility and porousness make for better curating and much better art. Yet I cannot help but return to the brute accountability of freaks like Adorno and Denon: holding off the supposed barbarians at the gates, becoming more barbaric than the supposed barbarians themselves. What if we suddenly found an appetite for the buck just stopping somehow, someplace? For the agonistic abeyance becoming a line in the sand? Let’s go back to Denon’s raunchy youth one last time: to the slander, forgery, espionage, pornography and so on. It was of course through the prism of various institutions that this adventurism shined through to begin with. If he’d been badass in a bistro, he would not have gotten far. In other words, instead of restricting oneself to the attractive flickering between the ambassadorial and the badass, the smoky backrooms and the barbaric critique, one could equally consider that the institution is the very source from which risk is nurtured and even rendered conceivable as such. Suhail Malik of Goldsmiths, University of London, has been proposing the idea of ‘affirmative negation’. To put it crudely, an affirmative negation accepts the institutional nature of even the most rabid form of defiance. Not as an excuse for melancholia, or for even more agonism, but as a good reason to hone an institutional identity with unapologetic precision – declaring it a moral horizon, no less. Given that many an art institution is now hearing the pounding at the gates, maybe barbarism is a refreshing option once again.Tirdad Zolghadr is a writer and curator based in upstate New York. He teaches at the Center for Curatorial Studies/Bard College.