Backtothefuture Clairedoherty

In
Search of the Miraculous
I have yet to find it…
…that elusive group exhibition through which the contradictions of social
engagement and visual pleasure run into one another, sending the
viewer/participant back and forth between conspirator and spectator. These
visual notes from the last six years trace singular moments of remarkable
participatory events, remedial interventions, utopian gestures and disturbing
transactions. How might an exhibition in 2001 have prepared us for such
encounters? As a statement of intent, the inaugural temporary exhibition at
Tate Modern should have been a promise of experiences as yet unimagined:
asking urgent questions and proposing new modes of engagement beyond
the passive contemplation dictated by the survey show’s meta‑narrative. If, as
Lars Nittve’s opening gambit suggests, Tate Modern is “of our time”, how
might the museum have opened up new ways of thinking about how art
enters and activates the social imagination?
There have been glimpses of new ideas (e.g. MACBA’s Las Agencias (The
Agencies), 2001 and Mass MoCa’s The Interventionists, 2005) and widespread
examples of the co‑option of institutional critique, epitomised by the Museum
as Muse, MOMA, 1999), but what seems to persist in Western curatorial
practice are two dominant orthodoxies: the annexing of participatory
strategies under Education and Outreach or the performance of prescribed
engagement under the self‑reflexive banner of New Institutionalism.
For this exhibition to be ahead of its time, In Search of the Miraculous would

need to combine the potential of multiple modes of engagement with the
popular appeal of distinct curatorial narratives, so often missing from the
‘navel‑gazing’ of new institutionalism. Though the project might signal the
critical platforms, social spaces, radio stations and networks that would come
to characterise the key European exhibitions of the last five years (such as
Utopia Station, Documenta 11, Rooseum, Malmö and Kunstverein München),
it should recognise Tate’s primary role as a cultural destination and the
increasingly corporatised context in which its programmes (and publics) are
produced.
I’ve wrestled with the form such a project should take, after all most of the

projects projected behind me occurred outside the space of the museum,
including that of the ill‑fated journey described in Bas Jan Ader’s title, and
come to a simple conclusion. In Search of the Miraculous should start with a
Claire Doherty
proposition: take the mechanisms of the temporary exhibition (nine rooms
over 1,300 sq m, 88 days, 240‑seater auditorium, registrars, technicians,
fundraisers, PR teams and event managers) and offer them to nine artists for
whom social engagement is fundamental – with just one request: that the
artists curate. The resulting projects would be structured through the
temporary exhibition suite, creating a unique set of entry points for the visitor
through one artist’s thinking process to another, with the potential for events
and programmes to bleed out into the social spaces of Bankside. This is not a
form of ʹdelegationalʹ curating, but rather attempts to open up the decision‑
making process and foregrounds the possibility for artists to contribute new
modes of experience to the spaces of Tate Modern.
The initial proposition derives its imaginative charge from the history of
artist‑curated projects (from Broodthaers Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des
Aigles to Jeremy Dellerʹs Unconvention). But its capacity to emerge as an
exhibition ahead of its time relies on two key ideas: the cross‑generational
selection of artist‑curators should reflect a multiplicity of approaches to the
social (thereby opening up debate beyond the narrow confines of one
discourse or another) and the provision of a free public space through the
construction of Rita McBride’s spectacular Arena in the Turbine Hall should
allow for the confluence of those approaches through a critical programme
devised by the group. Such an idea draws inspiration for Catherine David’s
100 days and the subsequent ‘opening exhibition’ of the Salzburger
Kunstverein 100 Days No Exhibition. This addresses a key concern: how to
reach the remaining 85% of visitors who do not pay to visit the exhibition.
So what might such a proposition lead to? One might speculate on the
surprising loans acquired by Kendell Geers, the dialogues and disagreements
between the environments of Cildo Meireles, Raqs Media Collective and
Adrian Piper, the beguiling fictions of the Atlas Group and Minerva Cuevas,
the sheer reverie of Johanna Billing or Annika Ström’s contests and the
contradictory pull between the autonomous interventions of William Pope L.
and the collaborative assertions of Jeremy Deller. These are just suggestions of
artists, and from the standpoint of 2006 of course, we can speculate on the
artists who were just about to make profound works – how fascinating it
would have been to see those propositions and conversations unfold.
Shifting Tate’s organising principles, In Search of the Miraculous would ask
how social engagement might not be predetermined; what differences lie
between provocation and solidarity and how power is exchanged in the social
transaction within and without the museum.
Claire Doherty
In Search of the Miraculous, as the great utopian Ernst Bloch once suggested,
would have allowed a process of dreaming forward, speculating on what was
to become one of the primary locales of debate around ethical and relational
aesthetics, at the threshold of a calamitous year, and might have
problematised the now pervasive rhetoric of participation and questioned the
instrumentalising of art’s social value.
Claire Doherty
Notes in Search of the Miraculous
Claire Doherty
Hans Schabus
Western, 2002
video still
Critical Art Ensemble
Body of Evidence, 2004
video still
Francis Alÿs
Cuando la fe mueve montanas
(When faith moves
mountains), in collaboration
with Cuauhtémoc Medina
and Rafael Ortega
Performance view, Lima
Peru, 11 April 2002
Claire Doherty
Minerva Cuevas
Del Montte Campaign, 2002
intervened logo, printed
matter
Jeremy Deller
Battle of Orgreave, June 2001
Produced and
commissioned by Artangel
Javier Tellez
One Flew Over the Void (Bala
Perdida) 2005
Performance at Mexico‑US
border, Tijuana
INSITE_05
Claire Doherty
Phil Collins
the louder you scream, the
faster we go, 2005
video still
Santiago Sierra
10 inch line shaved on the
heads of two junkies who
received a shot of heroin as
payment, 2000,
photograph, 150 x 224cm
William Pope L.
The Great White Way
2001 – on‑going
Claire Doherty
Annika Ström
Call for a Demonstration,
2006, poster advertising
children’s demonstration
in Hove
Claire Doherty

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For this exhibition to be ahead of its time, In Search of the Miraculous would

I’ve wrestled with the form such a project should take, after all most of the

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