I recently heard an anecdote regarding an art book seller (who shall remain unnamed here) and techniques of display. According to the seller, there are techniques or methods of arrangement that can absolutely guarantee the sale of a book. Which is to say, how it is placed, vertically or horizontally, and in relation to other books, and where on the presentation table it is placed. Presented as such, it will sell, apparently, no matter what. Tender and naive soul that I am, I was inclined not to believe it. It seemed somehow magical to me (people don’t buy books based on their covers, but rather on content…I wistfully reasoned). Even though it clearly is true. Not only did this prove (again) that the art world was wholly complicit with the meanest mechanisms of capitalism, it demonstrated to what extent we artlings remain, if not visually illiterate, then just as vulnerable to the commercial syntax of objects and goods as non-artlings. Despite our massive and compulsory consumption of critical theory, we can be quite literally enchanted into purchasing that which is supposed to safeguard us against such machinations (say, Barthes’ Mythologies), as if the conjunction of objects were tantamount to the weaving and casting of spells. This leads me to reconsider my alleged naiveté. Never mind the potentially cynical conclusion that we artlings are not quite as sophisticated as we think we are, not quite as equipped to provide the world with solutions it didn’t even know it needed, but that perhaps the space of display does participate in some kind of primitive magic, that it is finally capable of casting spells. Whatever the case may be, it is clear that issues of display remain both fundamental and antagonistic toward any kind of genuine visual literacy. These issues and any associated questions are as deeply imbedded in the origins of the museum, in the cabinet of curiosities, the wunderkammer, as they are in modern capitalism, with vitrines and the arcades in Paris and elsewhere. Where the former space is predicated upon the secularization of objects, the latter is predicated upon their fetishistic auratization. With the advent of the readymade, however, these distinctions have definitively blurred into one another. In his essay ‘The Curator as Iconoclast’ Boris Groys trenchantly reflects on the subject, identifying to what extent these spaces and the procedures that animate them are mired in paradox. According to him, curators of the wunderkammer were originally, to a certain degree, artists by virtue of transforming sacred religious paraphernalia into profane objects of aesthetic contemplation. Thus for a brief period of time, curators wielded the capacity to create art. With the advent of the readymade, however, the procedure and roles were if not reversed, then scrambled. Artists came to insert profane objects into the sacred space of the museum (or white cube), and in doing so, rendered them sacred, and the curator was deprived of his or her short-lived, iconoclastic status as artist. A point of particular interest in Groys’ paradox is how it alludes to the fundamental instability of the space of display, that which, to all intents and purposes, would seem to contradict the very nature of the display. This instability is if not due, then aggravated by its paradoxical identity as a space meant to arrest and preserve; in other words, to take out of circulation, all the while containing and offering goods precisely and demonstrably because they are in circulation, a contradiction or paradox which is itself again aggravated by the readymade.
Aura
Of course, any discussion of display in contemporary art has to take into consideration a very distinct lineage, including Haim Steinbach, Josephine Meckseper and Carol Bove. The initial series of above-mentioned paradoxes is probably most expertly dealt with by the work of Haim Steinbach. The point of departure for his seemingly simplistic displays tends to be the fetishistic auratization of objects or goods, which are simultaneously problematized by questions of seriality, and by extension, death. With the exception of the supermarket, which is fundamentally linked to illusions of abundance, objects are generally presented as singular displays, that which abets the creation of uniqueness and aura. Thus by symbolically serializing objects (two or three on same shelf), Steinbach at once precludes any auratization while morbidly underlining the extent to which they are associated with death (seriality, as Warhol so abundantly proved, being that which visibly liquidates aura, is indissociable from death, is essential to its neo-avant-garde visual grammar). It is important to note that Steinbach’s displays do not function as rebuses, do not semiotically deploy objects to illustrate a given idea, but rather manage to maintain a certain reverence for the irreconcilable strangeness carried out by the conjunctions performed therein, not to mention the objects themselves, no matter how banal.I wish I could say as much about the German, New York-based artist Josephine Meckseper. However, faced with her elaborate displays, which consist of a cloying blend of fashion, war and industry signifiers, and as such are liable to feature images of Hummers, women’s panties, ‘Going Out of Business’ signs, American flags, etc., I get the feeling that a very specific attitude and, more importantly, reaction is expected of me, like when a professor asks a question to which he or she already knows the answer. Which in turn seems to underestimate the power of this space, its poker-faced refusal to behave, stabilize and obediently convey semiotic injunctions. If Ama Saru and Hsiao Chen’s image of a man passing in front a post-riot display window riddled with web-like fractures, while the well-dressed mannequins stand there, stylish, cool, unperturbed, does not function as a fitting response to Meckseper’s practice, then maybe a certain work by Jimmie Durham does. Entitled A Stone from Metternich’s House in Bohemia (1998), this piece is comprised of a performance in which Durham crashes the eponymous stone through the surface of a small display case. The aftermath of the work, which remains throughout the whole show, is no less important than the performance. Seeing the stone there, surrounding by glass, it would seem as if a spell had been broken. But I am not so sure this is the case. Swiss, New York-based Carol Bove’s earlier arrangements and shelving displays, on the other hand, seem to be very much aware of the quasi mystical capacity of these spaces, featuring, as they do, all but mystical objects. From paperbacks on Zen and the Kama Sutra to peacock feathers and driftwood, the objects that sparsely populate her carefully arranged shelving units take on a quaintly awesome quality. They seem to be treated with a reasonable reverence which befits a personal, lower-middle class, counter-cultural cabinet of curiosities. Altogether allusive, they adumbrate the ethos of the past from which they issue – generally the seventies – while reflecting not only on the obsolescence of that ethos, but also ‘display’ itself, questioning to what extent it has become a historical phenomenon. What do I mean by historical? I mean the viability of displays, or their existence as a mode of encounter. This is not to say that they no longer exist– they clearly do– but their hegemony, so to speak, over how and where a consumer encounters a given good is no longer uncontested. All of which is to say that the instability by which they are internally afflicted has begun to exteriorize itself. What is more, this instability is further exacerbated by the archaeology of modernism that has characterized the new generation of artists (one of the most literal and museological examples would be Mark Dion).
Comeback
For if this archaeological turn has proved anything, it is to what extent many of the decisions that constituted it were essentially arbitrary, which is to say, guided by external forces and interests, as opposed to any internal fidelity to an objective representation of events and history. Interestingly, such an arguably historical shift is itself potentially mired in paradox, which accounts for some of its urgency. While the space of display begins to assume an increasingly antique air, the object, until recently if not banished then beleaguered by the dominance of video, the rise of neo-conceptualism and most recently, the discursive turn, begins to re-emerge and assume a renewed viability. Upon first glance, it would seem as if these two phenomena were linked in a chicken and egg scenario. But while one seems to lose consistency, at least symbolically, the other would seem to gain it, almost like two actors, as it were, who temporarily occupy the same stage, as one enters and the other exits. All that said, I think it’s also safe to assume that the revisitation of the cabinet of curiosities and display represents not only an attempt to wrest curatorial power from the curator, by bypassing the curator through self-curation, but also a disillusionment with and an attempt to seize control of one of the means by which meaning and narrative has been traditionally produced over the past couple of centuries, the twentieth in particular. The practice of Paris-based Jean-Luc Moulène becomes an interesting case in point here. Moulène, who has been known to describe his work as an attempt to ‘build himself a body’, would seem to correspond to much of what has been discussed here, even if the readymade does not have any real bearing on his practice. One particular work comes to mind from his exhibition Ce que j’ai at Chantal Crousel in 2008. Bordel d’organes (Mess of Organs) 2008, consists of three objects and a drawing spread out on a wooden display shelving, not unlike those of Steinbach. One object consists of an organ-like tangle of concrete, which has been tinted, and has a row of teeth inserted into it, as if it were some kind of jaw; a gnarled-looking knob of dark oak resembles human offal; a big knuckle of limestone with irregular perforations is distinctly reminiscent of a small, human skull; and finally, there is an A4 size drawing of what seems to be a small cavity. Evocative of geological specimens, organs, human and otherwise, and straight teratological phenomena, these mutant objects inhabit a thoroughly nebulous, pre-linguistic space, and as such, pre-empt the instability of the space of display while embodying the original conditions of the cabinet, which are those of unresolved anomaly, wonder and even phantasmagoria. Many, however, use techniques of display toward a variety of stylish, critical and fetishistic ends. One sees this from younger, more emerging artists such as Eva Berendes, David Jablonowski and Helen Marten, to more mature, if insufficiently recognized artists such as Barbara Bloom and Francisco Tropa. But I think its status as a collapsing space and contested mode of narrative nevertheless accounts for a great deal of its visibility and relevance, and is perhaps best embodied by the Swedish Christian Andersson’s From Lucy with Love (2011). Of mock-epic proportions where this form is concerned, Andersson’s display-case installation comprises six one meter cases in a row, the end of which abuts up against a wall. Unlike Moulène’s display, Andersson’s is operating in distinctly narrative terms, but the narrative he would like to tell is one that both contests the shaken authority of display, and by extension, the museum, and is of a highly subjective and idiosyncratic order. The cabinet begins at one end with a replica of Lucy’s skull, the 3.2 million-year-old hominid discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, and proceeds with a medley of objects and artefacts, including a lava lamp, postcard reproductions of paintings, mirrors, a precarious, home-made sculpture, and finally a looped 16mm film, which depicts found footage of a man in a biohazard suit discovering an accidental set-up of a coke bottle, shaken by the wind, tapping out a message on a Morse code key machine. Ultimately relating the story of its own arbitrary constitution, while being no less magical for it (one thinks of the Wizard of Oz, ‘Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!’– a statement, it is perhaps needless to say, that renders the whole affair more magical than ever), this elaborate and unorthodox installation is essentially an elegy for certainty as promised by the space and the dissolution of certainty, not to mention an elegy for the dissolution of the cabinet itself. Chris Sharp is a writer and curator based in Paris, and editor-at-large of Kaleidoscope
Chris Sharp
