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The classic retrospective, in which works are selected to present an overview of an artist’s oeuvre, is being radically renewed at the initiative of a new generation of artists. Recent examples are the exhibitions of Liam Gillick in Witte de With and Marc Camille Chaimowicz in De Appel. Alexis Vaillant, who as curator was responsible for the latter exhibition, places this development in perspective.In January 1997, Martin Kippenberger inaugurated his Respektive 1997–1976 at the Mamco in Geneva. This exhibition concluded a triptych that began in Paris in 1993 with Candidature à une retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, and was followed by La Fin heureuse de l’Amérique selon Franz Kafka at Boijmans Van Beuningen in 1995. These three autonomous exhibitions formed three progressive parts of an unannounced retrospective, fragmented over time (four years) and space (three institutions in three different countries). Such a project, especially by Kippenberger, could never be fully innocent or freewheeling. While initiating this retrospective process in 1993, Kippenberger founded a museum of modern art in Syros, in the Cyclades, which was ironically named MOMA’s Projekt. This museum is was a structure in reinforced concrete, evoking a warehouse under construction as much as an open-air slaughterhouse or a late twentieth century pagan temple. Every summer, members of his circle went there and occasionally produce produced ‘things’ on site. This empty and festive locale was an artist’s museum, functioning as both an antidote to the ‘retrospective’ context in which Kippenberger evolved at that time, and as a privileged territory for private jokes enjoyed by members of the Burö Kippenberger. Although produced simultaneously, the museum project and the retrospective project were never considered together. Yet the interdependence between the deconstruction of the concept of a retrospective and the construction of a museum persisted until the death of the artist in March 1997. The fact that the Tate Modern did not take this ‘coincidence’ into account when producing the Kippenberger exhibition in 2006 signifies that the post-mortem exhibition of Kippenberger has yet to take place. By orchestrating his retrospective while still living and combining it with a museum project, Kippenberger demonstrated that the retrospective should constitute a moment of actualization for an artwork.In 1998–1999, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno jointly produced an exhibition at the ARC/Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. They consequently shared questions tied to the exhibition of their work, to time and to cinema, among others. In the end, three solo shows were produced, overlapping with substantial fluidity, which exhibited works that shared an aesthetic, a sensibility and ideas, ‘recounted’ through video labels. This anonymous video narrator (a reference to Walter Benjamin) emphasized neither the authorship (who made what) nor the demarcation of zones (whose work is where), but rather what constituted the exhibition—namely, a community, stories and a narration.Several years later, each artist was invited separately to exhibit his/her ‘ten years later retrospective’ (first Philippe Parreno, then Pierre Huyghe, and finally Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster) at the ARC/Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris by incorporating old works with new productions, all contributing to a specific exhibition project defined by the artist. Huyghe, Parreno and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster steered clear of the retrospective and its corollary, ‘the catalogue’, most likely because for them, each new exhibition inevitably entails something new, such that one must pose the question: is their retrospective an exhibition of their exhibitions? This implies that each retrospective must define its form, for it will never be merely an ensemble of works by the same artist. The retrospective is a much more tightly woven and vital fabric than that. With Une Rétrospective (Tomorrow is Another Fine Day) in 2004–2005, Rirkrit Tiravanija radicalized the principle of the retrospective (Boijmans van Beuningen, ARC, Serpentine) by deciding against showing his principle installations since 1992. Instead, Tiravanija chose to evoke them and thus respond to the following questions: How do you reconstitute works that were time-based? How do you re-stage performative events? How do you include the collaborative nature of the work in an exhibition? The pieces themselves were represented through texts based on recollections of the artist’s work as written by American science fiction author Bruce Sterling, French artist Philippe Parreno and Tiravanija himself. A series of guided tours, audio guides, performances by actors and continuous broadcasts in the exhibition space afforded the public insights into works they may not have had the opportunity to experience. An awestruck audience moved from one empty room to the next, discovering an oeuvre through a story told in descriptions and contextualizations. Furthermore, by entitling this exhibition Une Rétrospective, Tiravanija insinuated that there would be others to come and, moreover, that the success of a retrospective is contextual. In 2003, Marc Camille Chaimowicz produced Jean Cocteau in Norwich, a kind of imaginary apartment for poet, filmmaker and artist Jean Cocteau. He restaged the operation in Nottingham in 2004, and then at the Migros Museum in Zurich in 2005, where Jean Cocteau was held in a nightclub (somewhat like Claes Oldenburg’s Bedroom Ensemble, which first took place at Sidney Janis’s, and then became, for other reasons, a ‘floating room’. Jean Cocteau is an autonomous work based on the idea that rooms are autobiographies written by their inhabitants. The room-within-a-room installation Jean Cocteau proposes a simultaneously fictive and real interior space, like a subjective narrative portrait of Jean Cocteau. A child of the La Belle Epoque, poet, writer and filmmaker Cocteau moved between diverse media with apparent effortlessness. His holistic career exerted a certain fascination on Chaimowicz. Alongside his self-created furniture, ceramics and found objects, Cocteau often incorporated the work of other artists. In Zurich, a bed and Marcel Breuer chair (supposedly belonging to Cocteau) were accompanied by a commissioned portrait of Andy Warhol, bronze lamp standards by the Giacometti Brothers and works by Tom of Finland, Paulina Olowska, Francis Picabia, Nadia Wallis and Enrico David (a list of guest artists that varied from venue to venue). This strategy is consistent with Cocteau’s practice, which often involved the generous exchange of works and collective projects. In Chaimowicz’s speculative exercise, Jean Cocteau himself is merely implied, present through his absence. The aesthetic unity and careful composition of the installation renders the poet’s conflict with painting conspicuous. The space itself becomes a walk-in painting, an oversized still-life oscillating between fiction and reality. As Cook Roger wrote in A Sense of the Tact: Zurich, Berlin & London (Miser Now, No 8, 2006), ‘Time to move to the bedroom, no ordinary bedroom this, but the reimagined boudoir of a perverse poet: The Cocteau Room. A poster for his film Le Sang d’un Poète (1930) awakens expectation. We are not disappointed by this third reconstruction, presided over by Warhol’s diamond dust portrait of Joseph Beuys, a magnificent addition to one’s memory of the other two. Other surprises await. This is a room in which to make discoveries, a room full of ambivalent objects to intrigue, to set imaginations free.’ Jean Cocteau is a curated collective exhibition and a work. An environment and installation in which the ensemble is unfolded in a space and ‘conditioned’ by enclosures, Jean Cocteau never fully repeats itself. Each occurrence is slightly different from the one before. Jean Cocteau thus remains a work in versions, a body of connections and complex liaisons that gravitates around the ambiguous and fascinating personality of Cocteau. Chaimowicz’s acuity for combining and composing an environment inspired me to ask him to organize a retrospective of his work under this model.This model implodes the distinction between an artist and a curator, in the sense that one is no longer burdened by the responsibility of one’s own ego. Originating in Jean Cocteau, Chaimowicz’s retrospective has become the ‘collective’…In The Cherished Company of Others… Interestingly, this a common strain for Chaimowicz, who has long collaborated with carpet weavers and furniture and fabric makers to develop a dialectic between applied arts and fine arts, and between his own practice and the appropriation of other individuals’ work—constructing what is, by default, both portrait and anti-portrait.This manner of creating gave the exhibition the status of ‘potential space’ more than disembodied brainstorm. It is a potential space that is, to quote Melvin Motti, a ‘successful attempt to refuse history as an overcoat or umbrella… to be deciphered again and again’, like all art that does not announce itself as being political or critical, but instead becomes it. Alexis Vaillant