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Journal #02 - January 2009

Boris Groys

Politics of Installation

The field of art is today frequently equated with the art market, and the artwork is primarily

identified as a commodity. That art functions in the context of the art market, and every work

of art is a commodity, is beyond doubt; yet art is also made and exhibited for those who do

not want to be art collectors, and it is in fact these people who constitute the majority of the

art public. The typical exhibition visitor rarely views the work on display as a commodity. At

the same time, the number of large-scale exhibitions—biennales, triennales, documentas,

manifestas—is constantly growing. In spite of the vast amounts of money and energy invested

in these exhibitions, they do not exist primarily for art buyers, but for the public—for an

anonymous visitor who will perhaps never buy an artwork. Likewise, art fairs, while

ostensibly existing to serve art buyers, are now increasingly transformed into public events,

attracting a population with little interest in buying art, or without the financial ability to do

so. The art system is thus on its way to becoming part of the very mass culture that it has for

so long sought to observe and analyze from a distance. Art is becoming a part of mass culture,

not as a source of individual works to be traded on the art market, but as an exhibition

practice, combined with architecture, design, and fashion—just as it was envisaged by the

pioneering minds of the avant-garde, by the artists of the Bauhaus, the Vkhutemas, and others

as early as the 1920s. Thus, contemporary art can be understood primarily as an exhibition

practice. This means, among other things, that it is becoming increasingly difficult today to

differentiate between two main figures of the contemporary art world: the artist and the

curator.

The traditional division of labor within the art system was clear. Artworks were to be

produced by artists and then selected and exhibited by curators. But, at least since Duchamp,

this division of labor has collapsed. Today, there is no longer any “ontological” difference

between making art and displaying art. In the context of contemporary art, to make art is to

show things as art. So the question arises: is it possible, and, if so, how is it possible to

differentiate between the role of the artist and that of the curator when there is no difference

between art’s production and exhibition? Now, I would argue that this distinction is still

possible. And I would like to do so by analyzing the difference between the standard

exhibition and the artistic installation. A conventional exhibition is conceived as an

accumulation of art objects placed next to one another in an exhibition space to be viewed in

succession. In this case, the exhibition space works as an extension of neutral, public urban

space—as something like a side alley into which the passerby may turn upon payment of an

admission fee. The movement of a visitor through the exhibition space remains similar to that

of someone walking down a street and observing the architecture of the houses left and right.

It is by no means accidental that Walter Benjamin constructed his “Arcades Project” around

this analogy between an urban stroller and an exhibition visitor. The body of the viewer in this

setting remains outside of the art: art takes place in front of the viewer’s eyes—as an art

object, a performance, or a film. Accordingly, the exhibition space is understood here to be an

empty, neutral, public space—a symbolic property of the public. The only function of such a

space is to make the art objects that are placed within it easily accessible to the gaze of the

visitors.

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The curator administers this exhibition space in the name of the public—as a representative of

the public. Accordingly, the curator’s role is to safeguard its public character, while bringing

the individual artworks into this public space, making them accessible to the public,

publicizing them. It is obvious that an individual artwork cannot assert its presence by itself,

forcing the viewer to take a look at it. It lacks the vitality, energy, and health to do so. In its

origin, it seems, the work of art is sick, helpless; in order to see it, viewers must be brought to

it as visitors are brought to a bed-ridden patient by hospital staff. It is no coincidence that the

word “curator” is etymologically related to “cure”: to curate is to cure. Curating cures the

powerlessness of the image, its inability to show itself by itself. Exhibition practice is thus the

cure that heals the originally ailing image, that gives it presence, visibility; it brings it to the

public view and turns it into the object of the public’s judgment. However, one can say that

curating functions as a supplement, like a pharmakon in the Derridean sense: it both cures the

image and further contributes to its illness.1 The iconoclastic potential of curation was

initially applied to the sacral objects of the past, presenting them as mere art objects in the

neutral, empty exhibition spaces of the modern museum or Kunsthalle. It is curators, in fact,

including museum curators, who originally produced art in the modern sense of the word. The

first art museums—founded in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and expanded in the

course of the 19th century due to imperial conquests and the pillaging of non-European

cultures—collected all sorts of “beautiful” functional objects previously used for religious

rites, interior decoration, or manifestations of personal wealth, and exhibited them as works of

art, that is, as defunctionalized autonomous objects set up for the mere purpose of being

viewed. All art originates as design, be it religious design or the design of power. In the

modern period as well, design precedes art. Looking for modern art in today’s museums, one

must realize that what is to be seen there as art is, above all, defunctionalized design

fragments, be it mass-cultural design, from Duchamp’s urinal to Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, or

utopian design that—from Jugendstil to Bauhaus, from the Russian avant-garde to Donald

Judd—sought to give shape to the “new life” of the future. Art is design that has become

dysfunctional because the society that provided the basis for it suffered a historical collapse,

like the Inca Empire or Soviet Russia.

In the course of the Modern era, however, artists began to assert the autonomy of their

art—understood as autonomy from public opinion and public taste. Artists have required the

right to make sovereign decisions regarding the content and the form of their work beyond

any explanation or justification vis-à- vis the public. And they were given this right—but only

to a certain degree. The freedom to create art according to one’s own sovereign will does not

guarantee that an artist’s work will also be exhibited in the public space. The inclusion of any

artwork in a public exhibition must be—at least potentially—publicly explained and justified.

Though artist, curator, and art critic are free to argue for or against the inclusion of some

artworks, every such explanation and justification undermines the autonomous, sovereign

character of artistic freedom that Modernist art aspired to win; every discourse legitimizing an

artwork, its inclusion in a public exhibition as only one among many in the same public space,

can be seen as an insult to that artwork. This is why the curator is considered to be someone

who keeps coming between the artwork and the viewer, disempowering the artist and the

viewer alike. Hence the art market appears to be more favorable than the museum or

Kunsthalle to Modern, autonomous art. In the art market, works of art circulate singularized,

decontextualized, uncurated, which apparently offers them the opportunity to demonstrate

their sovereign origin without mediation. The art market functions according to the rules of

the Potlatch as they were described by Marcel Mauss and by Georges Bataille. The sovereign

decision of the artist to make an artwork beyond any justification is trumped by the sovereign

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decision of a private buyer to pay for this artwork an amount of money beyond any

comprehension.

Now, the artistic installation does not circulate. Rather, it installs everything that usually

circulates in our civilization: objects, texts, films, etc. At the same time, it changes in a very

radical way the role and the function of the exhibition space. The installation operates by

means of a symbolic privatization of the public space of an exhibition. It may appear to be a

standard, curated exhibition, but its space is designed according to the sovereign will of an

individual artist who is not supposed to publicly justify the selection of the included objects,

or the organization of the installation space as a whole. The installation is frequently denied

the status of a specific art form, because it is not obvious what the medium of an installation

actually is. Traditional art media are all defined by a specific material support: canvas, stone,

or film. The material support of the installation medium is the space itself. That does not

mean, however, that the installation is somehow “immaterial.” On the contrary, the

installation is material par excellence, since it is spatial—and being in the space is the most

general definition of being material. The installation transforms the empty, neutral, public

space into an individual artwork—and it invites the visitor to experience this space as the

holistic, totalizing space of an artwork. Anything included in such a space becomes a part of

the artwork simply because it is placed inside this space. The distinction between art object

and simple object becomes insignificant here. Instead, what becomes crucial is the distinction

between a marked, installation space and unmarked, public space. When Marcel Broodthaers

presented his installation Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles at the Düsseldorf

Kunsthalle in 1970, he put up a sign next to each exhibit saying: “This is not a work of art.”

As a whole, however, his installation has been considered to be a work of art, and not without

reason. The installation demonstrates a certain selection, a certain chain of choices, a logic of

inclusions and exclusions. Here, one can see an analogy to a curated exhibition. But that is

precisely the point: here, the selection and the mode of representation is the sovereign

prerogative of the artist alone. It is based exclusively on personal sovereign decisions that are

not in need of any further explanation or justification. The artistic installation is a way to

expand the domain of the sovereign rights of the artist from the individual art object to that of

the exhibition space itself.

This means that the artistic installation is a space in which the difference between the

sovereign freedom of the artist and the institutional freedom of the curator becomes

immediately visible. The regime under which art operates in our contemporary Western

culture is generally understood to be one that grants freedom to art. But art’s freedom means

different things to a curator and to an artist. As I have mentioned, the curator—including the

so-called independent curator—ultimately chooses in the name of the democratic public.

Actually, in order to be responsible toward the public, a curator does not need to be part of

any fixed institution: he or she is already an institution by definition. Accordingly, the curator

has an obligation to publicly justify his or her choices—and it can happen that the curator fails

to do so. Of course, the curator is supposed to have the freedom to present his or her argument

to the public—but this freedom of the public discussion has nothing to do with the freedom of

art, understood as the freedom to make private, individual, subjective, sovereign artistic

decisions beyond any argumentation, explanation, or justification. Under the regime of artistic

freedom, every artist has a sovereign right to make art exclusively according to private

imagination. The sovereign decision to make art in this or that way is generally accepted by

Western liberal society as a sufficient reason for assuming an artist’s practice to be legitimate.

Of course, an artwork can also be criticized and rejected—but it can only be rejected as a

whole. It makes no sense to criticize any particular choices, inclusions, or exclusions made by