Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research: With Contributions by

ONCURATING.
org
N
Issue 26 / October 2015 Notes on Curating, freely distributed, non-commercial
Curating Degree
Zero Archive:
Curatorial
Research
With Contributions by
Felix Ensslin
Sabeth Buchmann
Sergio Edelzstein
Elke Krasny
Avi Feldman
Brian Holmes
Ellen Blumenstein
Dorothee Richter &
Barnaby Drabble (eds.)
Contents
02 86
Editorial “Something that has to do with life itself”
Curating Degree Zero Archive: World of Matter and the Radical Imaginary
Curatorial Research Brian Holmes
Dorothee Richter and Barnaby Drabble
93
08 The Curator and Her Double. The Cruelty of
Curating Degree Zero Archive 2003–2008 the Avatar
Ellen Blumenstein
17
The Subject of Curating – Notes on the Path 101
towards a Cultural Clinic of the Present Thinking About Curatorial Education
Felix Ensslin Dorothee Richter
32 110
Curating with/in the System Imprint
Sabeth Buchmann
40
Are Boycotts the New “Collective Curating?”
Sergio Edelsztein
51
Feminist Thought and Curating: On Method
Elke Krasny
70
Performing Justice – From Dada’s Trial to Yael
Bartana’s JRMiP Congress
Avi Feldman
Editorial Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research
Curating Degree
Zero Archive.
Curatorial Research
Dorothee Richter &
Barnaby Drabble
When we started a discourse on curating in 1998 with the conference
“Curating Degree Zero,” we could not have imagined the intensity of interest in
this subject in the coming years. In 2003 we wanted to re-examine the field
together with Annette Schindler, but when we failed to organise enough funds, we
changed the concept and concentrated on the archive, which originally should have
just accompanied the symposium. This decision, half by chance and half out of a
deeply felt interest in archival practices, proved to be valid, insofar that the archive
grew and developed rapidly. Curating Degree Zero Archive was invited all in all
eighteen times and therefore spatially reinterpreted and also extended eighteen
times in different contexts. Our goal was to use the archive as a discursive situation;
it was also presented in amazingly different ways, which made it visually alluring
and convincing. We recognise that some reviewers did take this shininess as a prob-
lematic side of the archive, but for us the idea of stirring up discussions was the
main focus. During the tour of the archive it became clear that the different ways
to present it, a task that we handed over to our cooperation partners more and
more along the journey, also created a discourse about spatial and visual represen-
tation, about interpellations through settings, and about ways to involve the public.
Finally, the archive as a body of publications, folders, CDs, invitation cards,

and websites is now situated in the library of the Zurich University of the Arts,
ready to be researched and re-interpreted. This publication and the upcoming ones
related to the Archive want to play back into the written discursive mode and, in
using the webjournal OnCurating for this undertaking, we want to make the mate-
rial again internationally accessible.
The first issue related to the archive concentrates on curatorial research.

Contemporary curating exists as a media conglomerate; the production of meaning
is achieved through a combination of artworks, photographs, commentary, publica-
tions, design, gestures, music, film, press releases, websites, and interviews. It is
situated in a specific political and cultural context. To analyse these complex situa-
tions we need a variety of approaches; for every project the combination should
alter, it makes a bricolage of methodical approaches necessary. The undertaking to
discuss curating on a profound level also inspired the conferences Curating as a
Glittering Myth, Curating as a Social Symptom, Curating as a Revolutionary Force?,1 and
Curating Everything (Curating as Symptom).2 In the symposia, and therefore also in this
publication, we have invited contributions from Elke Krasny and Avi Feldman, two
4 Issue 26 / September 2015

candidates from the PhD platform, a cooperation between the Postgraduate

Programme in Curating with the University of Reading, Department of Art.
The ironic title of the second conference, Curating Everything, already pro-
posed reading the activity of curating as a social symptom. We presume that the
contemporary urge for a curatorial position has an imaginary side: the wish to gain
authorship and agency as an illusionary closure in an overall unsteady and precari-
ous labour situation for cultural producers.
We would like to discuss curating in relation to changes in image production,

changes in experiences of distance and modes of perception, changes in the con-
ception of subjectivity and communities, changes in ways of the circulation of
images, and changes in digital and material infrastructures. We would like to ques-
tion curating with respect to topics of “race”, class, and gender. What can we pro-
pose as a critical attitude in curating achieved through ruptures, gaps, inconsis-
tency, failures, and dissent? All contributors share an interest in political agendas in
artistic and curatorial practices.
The articles we want to present here show exemplarily how curating can be
discussed not so much as case studies, but as scientific analyses. As for every critical
debate, the writers have clear positions; they are not uninterested or aloof in any
way or “neutral” and instead centre their arguments around a specific urgency. This
urgency is then argued throughout in depth. With these varieties of approaches, we
hope to offer future researchers some trajectories, new perspectives, and “meth-
ods”—in the above-mentioned sense—of debating curating.
Two of the contributions in this first publication are centred on examples of

artistic-curatorial practices. They have been specifically chosen because they are
relating the art world as a space of representation and discussion in new ways to
digital spaces; they change and questions formats and they also re-configure rela-
tions of artists, curators, and other experts.
Felix Ensslin developed his argumentation for our symposium Curating as a

Glittering Myth, Curating as a Social Symptom, Curating as a Revolutionary Force?, and
already the title of his contribution, “The Subject of Curating,” shifts in an ambigu-
ous way between meanings: addressing on the one hand the subject that is hidden
in the curatorial act (as curator or as addressee) as well as the inner kernel of curat-
ing, the topic of curating, what curating is about. Revolving around recent propos-
als of implied concepts of subjectivity made by curators and theoreticians, Ensslin
strives towards a radical rereading through Foucault’s theory of power and Lacan’s
four discourses to analyse the contradictory structure of curatorial practice.
Sabeth Buchmann uses Anton Vidokle’s complaint about art without artists
to draw historical trajectories. She shows that the struggle against politically com-
promised role models and representation conditions could be observed from the
perspective of Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari. After all, the “curatorial system”
that evolved from the 1960s shows that critique of power goes hand in hand not
only with democratic-political strategies of self-empowerment, but also with the
transversal dissemination and reterritorialization of power functions. In so far the
institutionalised form of curating is an aspect related less to individual intentions
and strategies as to structural frameworks. From my perspective, having discussed
the shift of power from self-organisation to a hierarchical re-organising of the field
with a specific interpretation of “curatorship”, Buchmann’s thoughts add to the

discussion of this shift that was based on institutional critique and therefore
opened up new forms and structures of cultural production.
Sergio Edelsztein asks in his contribution, “Are Boycotts the New ‘Collective
Curating?’” He shows that censorship and boycotts have started to be intermingled
in an uncanny way, not necessarily aiming at state powers but confusing the situa-
tion for local art communities. Whatever a boycott has been installed to target, the
local reception often leads to a reduction in financial support, especially for critical
art. He argues for re-establishing a differentiation of state power and ideological
forces, which might be contradicting or fighting against the actual ruling system.
He thus wants to evoke a deeper understanding of the historical and political situa-
tions.
As editors we believe that some of today’s boycotts target indiscriminately
an imagined “racial” group. By aiming at participating artists and hosting art insti-
tutions, some of the boycotts are conducted precisely against the parts of a society
that actually offer critical voices a platform. With our roots in the German context,
with its history of fascism and extreme ideological violence, we would like appeal to
cultural producers to take this into consideration and to question calls for boycotts.
In her contribution “Feminist Thought and Curating,” Elke Krasny addresses

the gender politics of curating. She argues that feminist thought has historically
emerged as politics, whereas curatorial practice has emerged as a distinctly cultural
practice.
“Feminist thought provides the methods of analysis in working out how
curating is responding to specific historic conditions and how curating does or does
not address the social changes wrought by feminism within these specific historic
conditions.” Curating as a social practice is part of the historic conditions which
feminism seeks to change. In her view, feminist thought relies on opening up, over
again and again, both of these questions: What is feminist thought, and what does
feminist thought do? The resistance to definition and to categorization opens up
the potentials for ongoing questioning, considerable conflicts, transformation, and
future change.
Avi Feldman undertakes, under the title “Performing Justice – From Dada’s
Trial to Yael Bartana’s JRMiP Congress”, to cross-read artistic/curatorial practice
with legal aspects.
The “Trial of Maurice Barrès”, created by Dada in Paris in 1921, serves as an
early example of pioneering experimentation with aesthetics and politics. Again,
these artistic actions to imitate and comment on society with its institutions have
to be situated in the historical context, which brings up a relation to the Dreyfus
Affair. In the essay, Feldman seeks to not only further explore the trial from a legal
perspective, but relates it the specific historical and political circumstances, and also
he draws conclusions to contemporary practices. In order to do so, he has chosen
to focus on the first Congress of “The Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland”
(JRMiP) created by Yael Bartana in 2012.
In this publication on researching curating, we would also show how an

artistic/curatorial practice adds to a certain kind of curatorial knowledge produc-
tion with its specific mix of visual, textual, and spatial media, and, as a new develop-
ment, projects which take the digital space especially into consideration. All these
different media components form a media conglomerate, to speak with Roland
Barthes: specific mythological constructions. To conceive the digital space as part
of a contemporary cultural public space, as a space of communication and conflict,

of a very specific cultural production, which one has to use, to react to it and to
interfere with it.
This is shown in two totally different examples. One project is discussed by

Brian Holmes: The World of Matter (http://www.worldofmatter.net/). This projects
shifts between a research project on natural resources and a series of exhibitions
and meetings. It is multi-authored on the one hand, but can also be connected with
some specific names, for example with the artist Ursula Biemann. Interestingly
enough, Ursula was invited by us to our first Curating symposium, because she has
acted as both curator (Shedhalle, Kültür etc.) and artist from an early stage
onwards. Until now her position has shifted constantly and has developed into
cooperating on a larger scale with researchers, activists, and artists. The outcome
of the research and debate is often accessible on the Internet, and the projects are
also presented in exhibitions and films. Brian Holmes discusses the project(s) from
a philosophical perspective, relating the imaginary institution of society to utopian
thinking. The question for Holmes is, What do we invent, how do we see the world?
How do we institute a new territory, a new reality?
In the second project, an avatar of a curatorial subject reacts to cultural

production in the imaginary (digital) space—but in an artistic intervention in the
exhibition space. The “as such”, the doubling of “personalities”, the intrinsic confu-
sion of identities that comes with the digital realm does its work: the figure of the
curator is hijacked by artists. “The Curator and Her Double” is the title of the
reflection by Ellen Blumenstein, when she invited the artist Ulf Aminde. In the
spirit of Antonin Artaud and his concept of cruelty, which demands that one should
relentlessly call into question one’s own ideas about reality and [man’s] poetic place in
reality and force the spectator to do likewise, the “avatar” represents an attempt to
become aware of those ideas oneself and to make them visible and palpable to
visitors. This project, a collaboration between an artist (Aminde) and a curator
(Blumenstein), sets out to champion the role of institutions, aiming at the imagi-
nary digital space with its central artificial figure, the avatar of the curator.
Undoubtedly CURATING is a new discursive formation, as defined by Michel

Foucault, which has rapidly developed since the 1970s. We are aware that we are
also part of this instituting process, with the developing of an Archive, with the
Postgraduate Programme in Curating at ZHdK, and with the PhD platform, a coop-
eration with the University of Reading and our various publications. This formation
is instituted in hierarchical formations and power relations. Therefore we strive to
open up processes, to question what instituting and de-instituting means, and to
make our thoughts, struggles, and research accessible. As in all forms of cultural
production, content and form are interrelated (but not the same), and it matters, as
an ideological production, what one does, what one brings into existence.
To mirror our approach of teaching as practice with its impact on curatorial Notes
projects and possibilities, the last article by Dorothee Richter discusses a specific 1 Curating as a Glittering Myth,
Curating as a Social Symptom, Curating
“pedagogical” attitude which is fundamental for the Postgraduate Programme in as a Revolutionary Force?, concept
Curating she directs. She tries to show how this works as a practice that is intensely Dorothee Richter, Zurich 2014, Zurich
University of the Arts.
informed by theory which influences and reflects actual projects and attitudes. So
curatorial knowledge production, understood as a complex offering of visual, spa- 2 Curating Everything (Curating as
tial, theoretical, context-related and historically situated meaning production, is Symptom), concept Dorothee Richter
in cooperation with Alena Nawrotzki,
therefore based on concepts of theory as a practice—a deeply politically motivated Zurich 2015, Migros Museum fuer
construct. In this article she tries to formulate this based on the example of Gegenwartskunst.
Gasthaus zum Bären / Museum Bärengasse in Zurich—one of the curatorial experi-
ments supported by the programme.

Dorothee Richter, curator, since 2005 head of the Postgraduate Programme in

Curating (MAS/CAS) www.curating.org at the University of the Arts Zurich ZHdK (Co-
founder and concept), she also co-founded with Susanne Clausen the “Research Platform for
Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Cultural Studies, Practice-Based Doctoral Programme” a
cooperation of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating and the Department of Fine Arts,
University of Reading. From 1999 to the end of 2003, Richter was artistic director of the
Künstlerhaus Bremen where she curated a discursive programme based on feminist issues,
urban situations, power relation issues, institutional critique. She worked as a curator ever
since. She co-curated numours symposia. She co-conceived and coordinated the research and
archiving project Curating Degree Zero (2003–2008) which explored critical and experi-
mental approaches to exhibition making at the beginning of the millennium. PhD “Fluxus.
Kunst gleich Leben? Mythen um Autorschaft, Produktion, Geschlecht und Gemeinschaft”,
publisher of www.on-curating.org which presents current approaches to critical curatorial
practice; In 2013 she finalised a film together with Ronald Kolb: „Flux Us Now! Fluxus
explored with a camera.“ 2014–2015 artistic director of Gasthaus zum Baeren/ Museum
Baerengasse, Zurich . At the moment she is working with Ronald Kolb on a digital archive/
film on Curatorial practice, a cooperation project of ZKM Karlsruhe and ZHdK.
Barnaby Drabble is a writer, teacher and curator based in Girona, Catalonia &
Zurich, Switzerland. He was curator of contemporary art at the National Maritime
Museum, London (2000–2004), initiating its program of temporary projects in relation to
its collections and exhibitions. He co-conceived and coordinated the research and archiving
project Curating Degree Zero (2003–2008) which explored critical and experimental
approaches to exhibition making at the beginning of the millennium. He formed one half of
the artistic/curatorial duo Drabble+Sachs (2001–2006) whose work focussed on issues of
public-space, inter-disciplinarity, urbanism, intellectual property & civil disobedience. Cur-
rently he is managing editor of the Journal for Artistic Research (since 2010) and, as a critic
and author, he regularly contributes to art magazines and publications. He holds a doctor of
philosophy (PhD) in visual culture (Edinburgh College of Art, 2010). His ongoing research
involves a focus on the public’s role in the exhibition, sentimental approaches to museology
and artistic responses to questions of sustainability and ecology. In 2005, together with
Dorothee Richter he co-founded the Postgraduate Program in Curating at the Zurich Uni-
versity of the Arts. Since 2009 he has been a faculty member of the MAPS program (Master
of Arts in Public Spheres) at the Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais, in Sierre, where he also
conducts his research.

Curating Degree Zero Archive in the MIZ Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research
Curating Degree
Zero Archive
as a Research Resource
In 2011, the material collected during the touring exhibition was gifted to
the Media and Information Centre (MIZ) at the Zürich University of the Arts
(ZHdK). Since the opening of the University’s new premises in the Toni-Areal in
2014, the archive is accessible as a permanent reference collection in the lower
floor of the MIZ.
Zürcher Hochschule der Künste , Medien- und Informationszentrum MIZ,

Pfingstweidstrasse 96, 8005 Zurich

Curating Degree Zero Archive 2003–2008 Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research
Curating Degree
Zero Archive
Dorothee Richter &
Barnaby Drabble
The Curating Degree Zero Archive (CDZA) documents the work of over 100
contemporary art curators who are known internationally for their critical and
experimental positions. This collection of exhibition documentation, gifted to the
archivists by the curators themselves, contains, among other materials, catalogues,
DVDs, magazines and ephemera. In this way the archive presents a representative
cross-section of the critical curatorial discourse at the beginning of the twenty-first
century.
The project began with the three-day symposium “Curating Degree Zero”,
organized in Bremen in 1998 by Dorothee Richter and Barnaby Drabble. Between
2003 and 2008, the two curators worked together again on the archive, which
grew in size as it travelled to eighteen venues around the world as an exhibition and
a program of live events and discussions.
In 2011, the resulting collection was gifted to the Media and Information
Centre (MIZ) at the Zürich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Since the opening of the
university’s new premises in the Toni-Areal in 2014, the archive is accessible as a
permanent reference collection on public display.
https://www.zhdk.ch/miz_curating
Initiated by Barnaby Drabble and Dorothee Richter, the archive was

developed in partnership with the following venues, collectives and institutions:
Plug-in (Basel), Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva, Künstlerhaus

Bremen, O.K Centrum für Gegenwartskunst (Linz), Spike Island Art Space
(Bristol), Halle für Kunst (Lüneburg), International Project Space (Bournville),
Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (Sunderland), Artlab at Imperial
College (London), Sparwasser HQ (Berlin), Edinburgh College of Art, Nuova
Accademia di Belle Arti (Milan), Festival der Künste & Museum für Gestaltung
(Zürich), INSA Art Space (Seoul), Association Drash & Point Éphémère (Paris),
Rakett (Bergen), West Cork Arts Centre (Skibbereen) and Galerija Miroslav
Kraljevic, Zagreb.

Curating Degree Zero Archive 2003–2008 Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research
The Archive consists of material gifted by the following curators, artist-cura-

tors and collectives:
Arts Initiative Tokyo, Rosanne Altstatt, Amasté, Artlab, Anthony

Auerbach, B+B: Sophie Hope & Sarah Carrington, Marius Babias, Basekamp,
Ute Meta Bauer, Lorenzo Benedetti, Tobias Berger, Ursula Biemann, Beatrice
Von Bismarck, Blok, Lionel Bovier, Tim Brennan, c a l c, camouflage, Ele
Carpenter, Daniela Cascella, Vaari Claffey, Barbara Clausen, consonni,
Copenhagen Free University, CRUMB, Alice Creischer & Andreas Siekmann,
D.A.E: Peio Aguirre & Leire Vergara, Catherine David, Joshua Decter,
Clémentine Deliss, Claire Doherty, Barnaby Drabble, Sergio Edelsztein,
Eichelmann, Faiers & Rust, EIPCP, Octavian Esanu, Jacob Fabricius, Elena
Filipovic, Fiteiro Cultural, Freee, Mark Garry, Sönke Gau, Catalin Gheorghe,
GMK, David Goldenberg, Horst Griese, Frederikke Hansen, Kent Hansen, Maria
Hlavajova, Justin Hoffmann, Manray Hsu, Andrew Hunt, Per Hüttner, Instant
Coffee, International 3, K&K, Christoph Keller, Alexander Koch, Annette Kosak,
Holger Kube Ventura, Kuda.org, Kuratorisk Aktion, Daniel Kurjakovic, Simon
Lamunière, Kelly Large, Maria Lind, Locus +, Chus Martínez, Bernd Milla, Elke
aus dem Moore, Nina Möntmann, Heike Munder, Lise Nellemann, Tone Olaf
Nielsen, Hans Ulrich Obrist, NEID, Paul O’Neill, Marion von Osten, Sarah
Pierce/The Metropolitan Complex, Planet22, Tadej Pogacar, Prelom, Aisling
Prior, Protoacademy, Catherine Queloz, Reinigungsgesellschaft, RELAX,
Dorothee Richter, Maria Riskova, Stella Rollig, Sabine Schaschl-Cooper, Annette
Schindler, Katharina Schlieben, Eva Schmidt, Trebor Scholz, Marco Scotini,
Yukiko Shikata, Nathalie Boseul Shin, Gregory Sholette, Joshua Simon, Lisette
Smits, Reinhard Storz, Bettina Steinbrügge, Szuper Gallery, Toasting Agency,
TNC Network, Attila Tordai, Trinity Session, Mark Tribe, Unwetter, Value,
Sencer Vardaman, Yvonne Volkart, Stevan Vukovic, Gavin Wade, Florian
Waldvogel, Cristine Wang, Astrid Wege, Lee Welch WHW, Jan Van Woensel, Ina
Wudtke, Florian Wüst, Tirdad Zolghadr, Tal Ben Zvi.
The following pages provide impressions of a selection of the venues to

which the archive travelled and the Archive in its final resting place at the Univer-
sity of the Arts in Zurich.

Curating Degree Zero Archive in Basel, Suisse Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research
Curating Degree Zero Archive in Basel

31 January – 8 March 2003
[plug.in]
St. Alban-Rheinweg 64, Basel
www.iplugin.org
With generous support of:

Migros Kulturprozent & Birsig Stiftung
Production: Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva

Exhibition Design: Elektrosmog, Annette Schindler,
Wolfgang Hockenjos, Patrick Parisi
The organisers wish to particulary thank [plug.in]

for their work on the initial production of
the archive, and the inital design of the website.

Curating Degree Zero Archive in Bremen, Germany Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research
Curating Degree Zero Archive in Bremen

8 August – 15 September 2003
Künstlerhaus Bremen
Am Deich 68/68, Bremen
www.kuenstlerhausbremen.de
Exhibition design: Elektrosmog, Barnaby Drabble,

Dorothee Richter
Additional Design: Hops Bornemann
Developed with support of: Kulturstiftung des Bundes
With the additional program

Short Presentation and Discussion
on Critical Curating
with Barnaby Drabble, Helmut Draxler, Frederikke
Hansen, Dorothee Richter, Stella Rollig,
in Cooperation with the art project “No Man is an
Island”, GAK Bremen

Curating Degree Zero Archive in Lüneburg, Germany Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research
Curating Degree Zero Archive in Lüneburg

12 February – 6 March 2005
Halle für Kunst

Reichenbachstr. 2, Lüneburg
www.halle-fuer-kunst.de
Installation designed an re-interpreted by

Reinigungsgesellschaft (Martin Keil and
Henrik Mayer)
With the cooperation of the University Lüneburg

Curating Degree Zero Archive in London, Great Britain Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research
Curating Degree Zero Archive in London

27 May – 26 June 2005
Artlab at Imperial College, London

Installation design and archive re-interpretation
by Artlab, Jeanine Richards and Charlotte Cullinan.
Discussion Event: 6th of May 2005

“Curating is part of my practice”
at Serpentine Gallery, The Sackler Centre of Arts
Education
with Henrik Schrat, Paul O’Neill, Lise Nelleman and
Artlab, Jeanine Richards + Charlotte Cullinan

Curating Degree Zero Archive in Seoul, Korea Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research
Curating Degree Zero Archive in Korea

20 December 2006 – 4 February 2007
Insa Art Space

Arts Council Korea, 90 Wanseo-dong, Jongno-gu,
Seoul, Korea
www.insaartspace.or.kr
Display and re-interpretation

by Sasa(44) & MeeNa Park
Opening talk and discussion 4pm December 20th

Curating Degree Zero Archive in Zagreb, Croatia Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research
Curating Degree Zero Archive in Croatia

29 October – 15 November 2008
Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic

Zagreb, Croatia
www.g-mk.hr
Curators Ana Janeski and Ivana Mestrov invited

the Curating Degree Zero Archive to Zagreb.
The installation of the archive in the Galerija
Miroslav Kraljevic in collaboration with the group
of young curating students and designed by
Dora Budor & Maja Cule.

Curating Degree Zero Archive in Zagreb, Croatia Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research

The Subject of Curating Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research
The Subject of Curating –

Notes on the Path
towards a Cultural Clinic
of the Present1
by Felix Ensslin
1
Introduction
The first question regards the locution itself: who writes or “speaks” here.
While I have curated art shows, both collaboratively and on my own, I am not
speaking from the perspective of a practitioner; rather, I want to approach the
question from a philosophical and psychoanalytic perspective or, more pointedly,
from the perspective where this necessary but uneasy partnership is conjoined.
The question I have posed for investigation is the question concerning the subject
of curating. Now, this is not a search for a full empirical description of what is
entailed in curating, e.g. a knowledge of displays, a view of what art history has
been, is or might be, knowledge of materials, cultures, and networks of people and
institutions, the search for the new or a new perspective on the old, tools for medi-
ation between a possibly enthusiastic but unschooled public and professional stan-
dards of judgement, mediation between what might be pressing issues of the day
and the long view, institutional management and fundraising—to list only a few of
the abilities and activities that might be entailed in actual curating. Curating is not a
kind of Fregean name to which we then find a finite or possibly dynamically finite,
i.e. changing with the times, list of propositions that define the content of that
name. When I ask what the subject of curating is or could be, I ask in a certain
philosophical tradition or, more accurately, in a tradition of questioning, redefining,
shifting, and deconstructing this tradition. This also means that I still think posing
such a question can lead to meaningful results. This would be contrary, for exam-
ple, to the stated judgement (and claimed practice) of the curator of a recent show
in Kassel called Speculations on Anonymous Materials, Susanne Pfeffer, who wrote in
her curatorial statement: “The element of individual creation takes a back seat and
the transfer of images and objects into the world of art becomes irrelevant as
such.” She claims that, “Over the last two decades, the relationships between image
and text, language and body, body and space, subject and object have changed
rapidly,” and that we organize art and thought no longer along the paradigm of
identity and difference but as elements of an infinite network.2 The cognitive side
of this network, she goes on, can engage only in a kind of varying speculation,
which, I suppose, is meant to say that it can no longer identify, conceptualize,
ascribe, or produce something like a subject position.
The search in which I am engaging, as will hopefully become clear, while not
being deaf to the reasons that make speculative realism such a hot property in the
ideas market, particularly in the cultural field and the art world, assumes that
something like a subject necessarily is involved when we speak not only about art in

general but also more specifically about curating. If only, in order to present a
moment, such a subject immediately calls for or even produces its own “working
through”, its own deconstruction and a shift in its very condition, it will in one way
or another be involved with identifying, categorizing, naming, that is, in opening a
field that stretches a subject from and to an object, that defines image through
space and space through image and that needs to answer the question regarding
the relation between image and language, even if any such answer is followed by
something like its own dismantling or reconfiguration.
Again: Restarting with Post-structuralism

Sigrid Schade and Dorothee Richter have argued for transferring Wolfgang
Kemp’s conception that the “viewer is in the image” to the idea that the “viewer is
in the exhibition.”3 However they also want to recognize what they call a
“post-structuralist displacement” of this notion, namely by recognizing that the
subject of the viewer is produced (or as they add: excluded) in part by the very
interpellation of the experience of the exhibition itself. They call on Althusser and
Lacan to justify this idea, implying a kind of après coup temporality or Nachträglich-
keit which depends on an efficacy, a Wirksamkeit, of discourse rather than on a kind
of expressive or self-creative ontology of “anonymous materials” to which both the
discourse and the objects it circles around are only insignificant matters or second-
ary phenomena. My search for the subject of curating is more akin to this later
search for the subject of the exhibition or the viewer than to a discourse that
assumes that an ontology of networking and materialist realism, and be it the
speculative kind, already has answered once and for all the question of the subject
as irrelevant. However, the stakes between these two positions are not trivial and it
is not simply a question of having the right theory or being on this or that theoreti-
cal bandwagon.
Material Networking and the Subject

Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, in their book Rethinking Curating: Art after new
Media, have argued that approaches that are traditionally more in tune with the art
world—and post-structuralism can be said to belong to this category—have failed to
adequately include phenomena such as new media art.4 They claim that net-
work-based work organized around behaviour they, along with Steve Dietz, call
“interactivity, connectivity and computability”5 and descriptions such as “central-
ized”, “decentralized”, or “distributed”6 have had difficulty entering into the theo-
retical and practical considerations of institutions and curators. While they at the
same time argue that distinctions along the lines of media are perhaps becoming
obsolete, because “it would seem that no matter the form of the artwork, the
medium never matters as much as the context,”7 and even state that “some theo-
rists have declared that we are now post-media,”8 they seek refuge by shifting from
substantives to verbs, by calling on a focus on what is done rather than what is
made or represented. While this is, like the speculative realist position, also a call to
consider networks of activity rather than a subject of discourse as the relevant
reference for the question of curating, here the subject still does not disappear by a
kind of theoretical fiat as happened in the self-explication of the exhibition Specula-
tions on Anonymous Materials. While the latter, if philosophically stringent, would
finally need to argue for some kind of self-selection process of anonymous materi-
als—if that is not simply meant to be a metaphor—Cook and Graham argue that
even within network-based new media art a kind of power rests with a gate-keeper
function, and be it only as that of the administrator of a mailing list or audi-
ence-produced file sharing site.9 Thus, I want to look first at the issue of power and
its relation to our search for the subject of curating with reference to Foucault.

Foucault
The fact that curating can be studied at universities shows that—if possibly
only by institutional pragmatism—curating is inscribed into a field of science, albeit
an interdisciplinary field. Thus, any search for the question of where the subject of
curating could be situated might well be located either within the Discourse of the
University and/or within a power/knowledge regime of what Foucault has termed
the “will to know.”10 The will to know produces a kind of selection process among
utterances, where those that are deemed “serious speech acts”, as Rabinow and
Dreyfus have termed them, are spoken by and within a context of somebody who is
qualified by other actions to speak this utterance.11 The main gateway to this quali-
fication is science, which by producing what is possible to be said, what is serious
and what isn’t, what counts and what doesn’t, exercises a will to knowledge. This
will to knowledge has two sides that correspond to the two sides of what it means
to be a subject: “There are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone
else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or
self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and
makes subject to.”12 With Foucault I would argue that where there is power there
is a subject. In his postscript to Dreyfus’ and Rabinow’s book that introduced Fou-
cault to a larger English-speaking audience in the 1980s, Foucault writes that he is
interested in how “in our culture, human beings are made subjects.” He differenti-
ates three ways in which this happens:
Objectification through scientific discourse—e.g. the speaking human being
becomes objectified through linguistic discourse, the active or working human
being through the discourse of economics, or the very living human being through
the discourse of biology or natural history.
“Practices of separation or division” that function both internally and exter-
nally, such as those produced by medical or criminological or sociological discourse
with divisions such as “healthy – crazy”, “good guys – tough guys”, “employed –
non-employed”.
Self-subjectification through discourses such as sexuality where a subject is
produced that at the same time it is forced to relate to itself as “having” a sexuality
and as being the subject of a necessary and complex objectification.13
This is not the place to go into the many problems and debates that have
sprung up around these positions of Foucault. The only reason I mention Foucault
at all is the realization that the prominence of the “networking paradigm”—suppos-
edly a signpost for the de-subjectification of productive processes in society in
general and in the art field in particular—proves no such thing. Power emerges
beyond either violence as a means of coercion or an already established consensus—
institutional or otherwise. Power, as Foucault notes, presupposes a “free subject”
on which it can work not in order to force directly—like violence—, or assume identi-
fication—like consensus—but to open a field of possibility, of producing options and
choices which, of course, at the same time exclude others, prohibit, make ridiculous
or impossible, or mark as non-serious any utterance or production outside that
field opened by power. Clearly the subject of curating, whatever it is, can be found
within this range of activities. Power, Foucault argues, engages by “a mode of action
upon the actions of others,”14 not by coercion or force.
The subject of curating appears on both sides of what Foucault tells us a

subject is. In order to speak from a position that would make an utterance or an
action part of a curating process, subjections and dependencies have to be realized.
These can be those involved in the institutional frame of exhibiting, publishing,
selecting, or those involved in gaining credentials, organizing the scientificity or
legitimacy of such utterances or actions. At the same time the subject of curating

him- or herself, however willing to renegotiate and put into question any such
stance, will come to speak from a position of conscious self-identification—of iden-
tity. Even Susanne Pfeffer signed the curatorial statement on “anonymous matter”
with her own name. Thus, before we move to the four discourses of Lacan we can
hold fast that whatever the subject of curating might be, it is a subject of the will to
knowledge that organizes the regime in which we live. One might even go so far as
to say that the expansion of curating beyond the confines of the caretaking of
museum collections is the pathway along which the will to knowledge has extended
its network of subject-production within the process of a globalizing world. The
very democratizing elements—the free spaces, the explosion of new media, the
predominance of post-colonial discourses—are both testimony and effect of this will
to knowledge.
Lacan’s Four Discourses

With this determination of the subject of curating as a subject of the will to
knowledge, I want to turn to Lacan and his four discourses in order to explore how
they might help in answering our question. I want to argue that we can attempt to
see with the four discourses that the subject of curating is caught in two paradoxi-
cal or schizophrenic positions, namely between the Discourse of the Master and
the Discourse of the Hysteric on the one hand, and between the Discourse of the
University and the Discourse of the Analyst on the other. In my final section, I want
to begin to discern if the idea of what I would like to call a cultural clinic of the
present could be made to work as means to operationalize and think the second
position, between the University Discourse and the Analytic Discourse, as a proper
place for the subject of curating.
The Four Discourses of Lacan15
Fig. 2: Places and Terms in Lacan’s Discourses16
Lacan’s discourses are a complex instrument of analysis, and I will not be able
to unfold it here in full. However, let me give a short introduction how he intro-

duces them in Seminar XVII “The Other Side of Psychoanalysis”.17 He thinks of the
discourses, which show the relationship between agent, object, truth, and what
Lacan calls “surplus jouissance”, as “lien social”, i.e. as social bond determining inter-
and intrasubjective relationships. While he disclaims any reading that would deter-
mine a historical series, it is equally clear that the Master Discourse represents the
social bond of traditional Western, i.e. patriarchal, societies. It hides the fact that
the bearer of power is itself a “castrated” subject ($), i.e. one not fully present either
to himself or in the signifier that represents him or her. Nevertheless, its command
as one brings all others, the knowledge and skill, to work (S2) thus producing sur-
plus jouissance for the prestige of the master. The Hysteric’s Discourse is in a sense
the one most closely connected to the master both because it permanently ques-
tions the identity between the subject of the master and his or her representation,
thus foreseeing the master to legitimate him- or herself through the production of
reasons for his or her position and commands (i. e. knowledge) but also because the
truth of the hysteric’s desire, namely the jouissance derived from such delegitimiz-
ing questioning, would run empty if the master failed or vanished. The University
Discourse serves the master as its truth while claiming to speak only from a posi-
tion of knowledge. Everything without exception becomes the object of research
and analysis and nothing that cannot claim the status of such knowledge is allowed
to stand as valid. Through such a practice, the product of this discourse becomes
castrated subjects who are unable to claim subjective truth for themselves outside
of the products of the “will to knowledge.” In the Analyst’s Discourse, the agent is
precisely the drive object that cannot be fully contained either by the master and
his social representations or by knowledge in its legitimizing function. Its truth is
that there is other knowledge, knowledge of the unconscious (savoir) opposed to
and different from the knowledge of the will to power (connaissance). The split in
knowledge itself sustains the split in the subject which thus can find its bearing only
through a kind of proper name for its desire, a new S1 in the place of the product.
If we return to the question of the discourse of the curator and my claim

that this discourse can be shown to be caught in two conflictual positions “in
between” two of Lacan’s Discourses, the first such conflict is easy enough to see.
Regarding the institutional framework of curating, the subject of curating is a sub-
ject of the Discourse of the Master. What is at work here is repression and power,
whether in the agent position as S1 or in the object position as S2. S2, the artists, the
writers, even to an extent the audience, works for S1, the institution, and its repre-
sentative, the curator. The product is a surplus value, symbolic or even real capital
for the institution and the curator. A freelance curator might find herself in the
position of S2 herself, her knowledge used to produce prestige for the master—the
institution to which she was given temporary access. However, the nature of the art
field dictates that this is countered by the position of the curator as “hysteric”,
representing and enabling institutional critique, the inclusion of hitherto excluded
media or artists or geographical regions in the process of questioning the master,
the traditional collecting principles of a museum, etc. The product will be new
knowledge S2, which while unable to exert change on the level of “truth”, i.e. the
motive for the process of such questioning between “hysteric and master”, will then
be included into the functioning of the institution, the sponsor, the art-historical
set-up etc. The actual effect of this double existence of the subject of curating in
the Discourse of the Master and the Discourse of the Hysteric is to legitimate the
very institution and power-structure that supposedly is questioned by processes of
institutional critique by the expansion of the canon or by the inclusion of different
media or geographical areas. As Hans Belting has argued in a somewhat different
context both the exhibition Primitivism in the 20th Century at MoMA in the middle
of the 1980s or even the much more radical Magicians of the Earth at the Centre

Pompidou in 1989, recently restaged at the same place, are good examples of this.18
But of course this double inclusion goes much further into the nook and cranny of
the everyday process of confrontation with the institutional framework of curating
and is not preserved for the powerful institutions just mentioned. Structurally, this
happens even when a curator is asked to work in an off-space temporarily funded
by a state agency or a sponsor.
Between the University Discourse and the Analyst’s Discourse

Much more interesting, and relating back to the point I was trying to make
with Foucault, is the second paradox or juxtaposition between the University Dis-
course and the Analyst’s Discourse. The legitimating function of knowledge, which
holds the place of agent in the University Discourse, has not been weakened by the
process of multiplication and diversification of curatorial practice that we have
witnessed in the last decades (and that have had historical precursors in many ways,
but that is another issue). What legitimates the subject of curating is knowledge,
even if it might be knowledge of the new or new knowledge up to now excluded
from the purview of what counts within the arts and the art world. In fact, this very
process of expansion, of exercising curatorial practice to include what has been
excluded—also a process set in motion by the hysterical position that produces new
knowledge—strengthens both what is in the position of truth and what is in the
position of product in the University Discourse. It does not change the role of the
master whom the University Discourse serves, nor does it avoid producing “cas-
trated subjects”, i.e. subjects that are forced to express themselves in the ways that
this process has legitimated and brought about. Categorization, cataloguing,
archiving—all of these are processes that bring objects, people, and practices under
the purview of the University Discourse. Professionalism— here we find the link to
the will to knowledge—can only be verified through the castration of expressing
and through operating within the terminology and categories given the status of
“serious speech acts”. To be clear, this is not to say that nothing happens in this
process. Just like the Hysteric’s Discourse allows for the expansion of existing logics
to a wider category of phenomena, the University Discourse allows for the inclu-
sion of ever more objects of consideration. But, and here we return to the question
of the subject of curating, what the University Discourse must exclude is the idio-
syncratic, the subjective proper, intuition, style, and the impossibility to say it or say
what “it” is.
I want to now begin a detour towards the Discourse of the Analyst. These
first thoughts on the subject of curating are part of a larger project on which I have
been working off and on, in spurts, for a few years now, namely the idea of devel-
oping a concept of a cultural clinic of the present as a kind of antidote towards the
logic of the University Discourse. My final aim in this article would be to develop an
idea of how the subject of curating while not being able to avoid its inclusion (and
therefore castration) by the University Discourse also has a place in the interstices
between the Analyst’s Discourse and the University Discourse. But in order to
sketch this idea, I will first have to outline what I would like to call the cultural clinic
of the present.
The Cultural Clinic of the Present

The reference here to the clinic is less to the institution that Michel Foucault
described in its development in the nineteenth century—though no usage of the
term can avoid this connotation—but rather serves to point towards something like
a “praxis”, a practice. This use of the clinic refers back to the recliner into which an
outpatient settled rather than to the hospital bed to which he was tied. It also

implies the clinamen, the little swerve of the smallest atomistic particles with which
Epicurus and Lucretius saved nature and thus man from total determination by
natural law. As a first approach, we can juxtapose the clinic as implying practice of
something like “theory” or “contemplation”, drawing on the distinction between
the theoretical life and the life of praxis that we can already find in Aristotle. Since
for Aristotle these two are joined by a third kind of activity closer to practice or
praxis, but not identical with it, namely to poiesis or making, my claim for the cul-
tural clinic as praxis means for it to be distinguished from this side as well. Thus,
clinic refers preliminarily to a practice that is neither purely theoretical nor engaged
in poiesis.
When we think of the psychoanalytic field and the usage of the term clinic
therein, another specification can be made: clinic is neither simply diagnosis nor
simply cure, neither simply aetiology nor simply nosology or symptomology.
Rather, in psychoanalysis all these epistemic spheres are connected within the
clinic—separable for epistemic reasons only at the cost of a separation from the
practice that the clinic itself is. It is for this reason that in the end, while engaging
with the teaching and writing of others, each practicing psychoanalyst has to
develop his own theoretical framework, his own theory as it were, intrinsic to his or
her practice and beyond what he or she either learned from others or will transmit
to others as knowledge. Maybe the practice of the subject of curating or the prac-
tice that makes curating a subject position is similarly a practice that only finds its
place fully, when each practitioner develops his or her own theory intrinsic to his
practice, a kind of interdependent double that is not separable on the empirical or
ontic level.
With this observation we can begin to travel down the road of another asso-
ciation conjured up by this inseparability—which, I would like to point out, is not
necessarily the same as “unity”. This association leads us to the field of aesthetics
and the question of critique. Starting with the Romantics—for example Friedrich
Schlegel’s “universal poetry”19—critique became an operation that could no longer
be fit easily into a pre-given subject-object-relation. The critique of an artwork
came to be understood not simply as the subjective apprehension—cognitive or
affective—of a given work. Rather, critique became an element within what Walter
Benjamin—referring to the early Romantics—called a “medium of reflection.”20 Thus
critique became a process by which the artwork itself was completed—never once
and for all, but over and over again. Starting from this point of view but against its
tendency to dissolve in the medium of an “eternal conversation”, from the real of
both the artwork and the truth which critique could develop from within, Benjamin
later developed a paradigmatic understanding of “critique” as a practice which laid
bare the “truth content” of a work without dissolving it completely within the
reflection that accomplished this task. Rather, the truth content is a kind of object-
cause propelling forward the critique and transcending the historical confines of
poiesis—the making of the art-work. Poiesis would be related to what Benjamin called
the “Sachgehalt”, that is “material content” or “subject matter” of an artwork, while
its “truth content” or, more literally, its “truth matter” was the object-cause of
critique. 21 Science would be what could objectify the first but maybe not the sec-
ond. The second, the truth content, might appear only in the practice of critique—
or curating—or not appear at all.
Thus, the cultural clinic of the present towards which this article wants to
make a small contribution is both a tautology and a leap. It is a tautology to the
degree that we consider art a cultural phenomenon and its presence—or present-
ing—through critique a practice. Thus, cultural clinic refers to practice twice if we

remember that “clinic” also refers to a domain of practice or praxis. But in the repe-
tition, the two elements become conjoined by a leap over historical and disciplinary
boundaries: namely precisely critique and clinic. Mediated through the tertium
comparationis of the term praxis we have thus joined aesthetics and psychoanalysis.
At the same time, however, the question of how to understand practice becomes
even more urgent and pressing.
Realism, Constructivism and the Space of Truth

Alain Badiou has made the observation that today there are two options
within philosophy and within the wider cultural field. One he calls “democratic
materialism” and defines its axioms with the statement: “There are only bodies and
languages.”22 Embodied within this axiom, one could argue, are two possibilities
that in some ways define the trajectory of European philosophy. On the one hand
there is the tradition of realism, embodied in the epistemological mantra that
knowledge is achieved through the “adequatio rei et intellectus”, i.e. the adequate
alignment of the thing known and its linguistic or symbolic representation in the
mind. On the other hand there is the tradition of constructivism, which holds that
the linguistic or symbolic element produces the object known and it is thus a pro-
cess of construction—be it transcendental as with Kant, dialectically ideal as with
Hegel, or confined to the systematic elaboration of a specific medium as in much of
sociology, system-theory or theories of performativity. Realism understood in this
way holds sway today over fields of inquiry such as evolutionary genetic biology or
hard-core cognitivism of the Daniel Dennet kind. Constructivism can be found in
neo-Kantian approaches to symbolic structures as much as in theories of performa-
tivity of the Judith Butler kind.
Against this, Badiou sets another path of philosophy, namely the path that is
based on the axiom that “there are only bodies and languages, except that there
are truths.”23 This approach, set against the “democratic materialism” which I have
just described, he somewhat polemically names “materialist dialectic”.24 Now, I
want to set aside for the present purposes Badiou’s own mathematical ontology by
which he means to oppose the supposed determinacy of the real, which is thought
by the realism and constructivism of the democratic materialist approach, with the
real indeterminacy that opens up the space for truth. Instead, I want to use Badi-
ou’s differentiation in order to take a step back to Lacan. From Badiou’s perspec-
tive, and from the perspective of the speculative realists I spoke about in the begin-
ning, this may be rather a step backwards—in the wrong direction, as it were.
However, it is also Badiou who coined the saying that after Jacques Lacan no philos-
ophy is possible that has not passed through the eye of a needle that is Lacan’s
psychoanalysis. And my step back returns to this eye of a needle, in order to look
for the conjunction of cultural critique and the clinic. For Lacan, the truth is a sur-
plus of language that acts in the body. It is not grounded in a mathematical ontol-
ogy but in the very process of adequation between rei, the things, and intellectus
understood as knowledge or proper understanding. The process of producing
categories is an indispensable element of any form of critique and practice. It is
what marks the appearance of a subject—also in the practice of curating, I would
argue.
Psychoanalysis Places this Object in the Body/Body-Event

I want to make this clearer by approaching a passage in Lacan’s Seminar XI
that implicitly refers to the philosophical problem of the relation of bodies and
language. The implicit background of Lacan’s elaboration about the problem of an
“adequation between things and intellect” is this: from Parmenides through to
Plato, philosophy sought to ground knowledge of things in knowledge of the origin,

the arche. Being is one and being is what is available through logos for thought. This
was Parmenides’ answer. Plato sought to place the arche in the Ideas. But Aristotle
opened up another dimension for philosophy, by no longer wanting to clarify the
origin but rather the conceptual framework by which things are apprehended or
known. “Being is said in many ways” is his famous dictum and his endeavour was to
clarify the ways in which that happened, how language is able to produce epistemi-
cally guaranteed statements about things that are, about being. 25 Famously, one
cornerstone of those clarifications was what became known as the “categories”.26
On the basis of this categorical clarification both realist and constructivist or nomi-
nalist traditions were built, but this is not my point here. Rather, with the help of
Lacan I want to return the categories to the place from which they sprang. “Kate-
gorein” means to accuse or rather to indict or to charge someone. Aristotle takes
this term from the courthouse, because for him it is clear that the courthouse (as
an institution, if not in all its dealings) is a place of justice and truth. It is before this
background that Lacan takes up the scholastic adage of truth or true knowledge
being “adequatio rei et intellectus” by pointing out that rei is not just a case of res,
things, but also of reus, which is the term for the accused before the law. 27 The
conformity of knowledge (of the accused) with the charge that indicts him and the
indictment that charges him: this is the dimension of truth that Lacan wants to
point out in his transformation of the epistemological ground rule of adequatio rei et
intellectus. We can lay aside all the connotations of fatum, or fate, that are conjured
up by this return to the categories as the process of indictment and look at it in a
more technical, i.e. clinical sense. To conform one’s knowledge—connaissance, i.e.
imaginary knowledge under the synthetic function of the ego—with the signifier
under which the subject must assume its place is, of course, impossible. It is this
very impossibility that produces a remainder, an object-cause in what Lacan calls
the real. This object-cause is never neutral or simply put aside; rather, it is what
insists and what cannot be integrated in the imaginary unity of connaissance. To be
under indictment—under the categories of the symbolic—is what produces an
impossibility, namely the impossibility of being unified within the proper represen-
tations effected by the imaginary, the Ego. What carries this impossibility is the
object-cause, the remainder that insists.
Thus, if we return to the beginning of this section we can summarize this

position as follows: there are languages and bodies, yet the bodies as represented
entities in knowledge (connaissance) carry within them a lack, something that is not
embodied in/by them, but rather covered up by the specular image of the body, the
imaginary. There is thus also a third term beyond language and body, just as with
Badiou there was the third, namely truth. But is the object-cause, the remainder,
itself truth? This concept of truth does not simply mean knowledge, if knowledge is
predicated on the complete adequation between things and language. But truth is
also not simply this remainder that makes it impossible to produce closure between
language and things so as to produce knowledge. Rather, this remainder is a kind of
cause, an object-cause, which can be the cause of a praxis which is the elaboration
of truth as a different kind of knowledge, savoir, symbolic knowledge or in psycho-
analysis: unconscious knowledge. Praxis “is the broadest term to designate a con-
certed human action to treat the real by the symbolic”28—this is the way Lacan in
Seminar XI sums up what for him the originally Aristotelian term praxis means. Lacan
speaks of the clinic, of course. It seems to me that what Lacan is referring to is the
Freudian term of Durcharbeiten, working-through.29
If the clinic is a practice in this sense, then we now can say: the clinic is the
symbolic working through, the elaboration of a truth. If we also remember the short
mention of Benjamin’s elaboration of the romantic notion of critique, where it is no

longer simply embodied in the “reflexive medium”, but rather itself both lays bare
and takes up an object-cause beyond the “subject matter”, the “material content”
of an artwork, we can see how this practice of critique can well be described by the
same structure. Since critique produces the “truth content” rather than simply
adequately describing or representing it, this kind of critique can also be thought of
as a symbolic working through of something real.
How to Think this Working-Through?

The answer to this question lies with the later Lacan and his rewriting of the
modalities of thought and action: the contingent, the necessary, and the impossi-
ble. Democratic materialism deals with the imaginary duality of necessity and possi-
bility: the laws of nature and the structure of the fantasies that govern our social
space are experienced in the register of necessity. Lacan re-writes necessity as that
which does not cease, as that which does not stop writing itself.30 We can find in this
the law of bodies as the laws of nature, but also the law of the fantasy: it is that
which does not stop writing itself, producing in every change the same result, gov-
erned by an imaginary elision of its own object-cause. In the realm of politics, it
appears as the language that speaks of causes of action with “no alternative”.
Reforms are organized around this paradigm: necessity is that which does not stop
writing itself. At the same time—and contradictorily—what is upheld is the language
of possibility within the register of optionalism and liberal choice. The society of
control, as Deleuze has called it, makes everyone an entrepreneur of his own exis-
tence, the ego driving a ceaseless arrangement and rearrangement of its objects. Be
all that you can be and never miss anything while you’re at it: the gadgets of our
information age are only so many symptoms of this culture of possibility that is gov-
erned by its neighbour, necessity without alternative.
However, Lacan introduces another way of thinking about possibility by

rewriting contingency as that which stops not writing itself. This contingency is not the
product of available options that are at the same time governed by a social and
natural necessity that knows no alternative, but is related, rather, to impossibility,
i.e. to that which does not stop not writing itself. Contingency is realized, when a
piece of the impossible—of that which does not stop not writing itself—turns into an
elaboration of something that stops not writing itself.
We can recognize in this new formulation what we have earlier called a prac-
tice. The practice of the clinic is easily recognized in this: what happens in psycho-
analysis is that something impossible stops in some way being impossible. But this
does not imply a sudden full realization of the impossible—as in the passage à l’acte.
Rather it is something of the impossible that is realized, that “stops not writing itself.”
The object-cause, the partial drive is picked up and elaborated in a different sym-
bolic mode offering just a partial, but real, satisfaction.
We can also recognize in this what we have said of critique. If critique is the
realization—or completion—of the art-work, as the Romantic tradition has it, then it
is so only in this mode: something partial of it—let’s call it with Benjamin its “truth
content”—is elaborated into the contingent mode of the present. But never as a
totality—and never as the realization of the aesthetic illusion—but rather as the
Schein or illusion that moves from the imaginary to the symbolic. This is what
Zupančič has called the “real of an illusion.”31 I can’t go through her entire argu-
ment here, but it can be summarized as follows: the condition of subjectively
assuming the position of a practice is an illusion, namely the illusion of the totality
of the symbolic practice itself. This illusion does not mean—as it would in the imagi-
nary register—the promise that the fantasy finally gets realized. But rather, that in

order to subjectively relate to the practice, the subject has to choose it without
exception, and that means without basing it on the fantasy of exception. Without
exception: this is the term for the universality embedded in every practice. Yet this
universality is precisely embedded in a practice: it is not a representable universal
nor a regulative ideal, but a practical universalizability, a becoming universal. It ties
the object-cause to a symbolic dimension, knotting together as it were the body
and language, by registering a subjective position in relation to the symbolic dimen-
sion that falls outside the given world of democratic materialism and its offers of
necessity and optionalistic liberal possibilities. It is a subjective position not on the
level of conscious knowledge, imaginary connaissance, but on the level of savoir,
unconscious symbolic knowledge, precisely because it has to be chosen against the
evidence of necessity and the promise of possibility within the culture of demo-
cratic materialism. Practice thus is related to a fundamental shift in the subjective
position that can be mediated by the knowledge of the Ego but only through open-
ing to the register of impossibility as real, the very register the culture of demo-
cratic materialism forecloses.
If we return from this to the question of the clinic and critique, to the ques-
tion of the cultural clinic of the present, we need to ask what follows for the con-
ceptualization of these terms. First it is of particular importance to mark the dis-
tance this approach has from all hermeneutic practices, but also from all forms of
discourse analysis that simply aim at the historicization of the objects of inquiry.
They both, too, have their roots in the Romantic tradition but they either develop
on the basis of a kind of Hegelian spirit, Geist, which provides an ideal horizon of
unification of particular practices and acts of interpretation or, in discourse analysis,
completely separate them from what Benjamin called the “truth content” by way of
reducing objects of interpretation simply to their “material content” relating them
to a particular historical episteme. Against this, each action within a practice we have
developed on the model of the clinic and critique is singular. It has no horizon of
unification—for it excludes the imaginary function of unity—but stands in a relation
to truth that is never completely presented and presentable. This is the subjective
side of a practice: it relates to its symbolic dimension as a totality that is not repre-
sentable, not present. Conversely, it aims to interpret or better to take up, develop,
envelop, produce from the truth content, precisely the lack of the totality that
appears in different cultural phenomena within the present scope of democratic
materialism. It picks up that which “does not stop not writing itself” in an act in
order to produce from it that which “stops not writing itself.” It transfers the
impossible to the possible, but by adhering to the split within possibility itself. The
possible thus produced and developed is never inscribed within a horizon of full
realization or, more psychoanalytically speaking, full satisfaction. Its object is partial
just as its object-cause is partial. This means first, that—as I have stated earlier—this
transfer from the impossible to the possible is not a passage à l’acte, a blaze of truth
and glory, unifying being and language in a momentary realization of totality. Sec-
ondly, it means that a cultural clinic is not concerned with meaning, but with truth.
Certainly, the register of meaning—the imaginary unity of experience—is never
absent from any act that is a practice; but practice works through meaning to real-
ize a measure of what is, within meaning, signified as impossible.
The Subject of Curating Considered in the Light of the Cultural Clinic of

the Present
What follows from this sketch of the cultural clinic for the subject of curat-
ing? Well, certainly that it is not one. But, just as importantly, that it is not many,
either. Catchwords like “interdisciplinarity”, the shifting costumes of scientific and
cultural identifications, the simple presence of multiplicity, difference, geographical

inclusion, ironic repetition, or a posture of openness against closure and plurality

over and against dogmatism does not yet mark this subject. It is neither one, nor
many, for it appears in the specific ways in which it knots together the experience
of an impossibility with the registers of the University Discourse, with the question-
ing of the master that is the lot of the hysteric and with the institutional realpolitik
of the master discourse itself. This impossibility is not simply an identification of
something left out: women, post-colonial subjectivities, new media art, etc. It is
quite possible to engage any of these exclusions on the level of science or in the pas
de deux of the master and the hysteric. This impossibility appears e.g. when an
attempted categorization does not fit the practice or object one has selected. It
appears when the need to legitimize within the Discourse of the University silences
a language and a thought, a project or a doubt that permeates any attempt to
symbolize an experience that has not had yet its time. It appears wherever some-
thing resists the many ways in which bodies and languages circulate within materi-
alist democratic consumerism. It appears as resistance to the demand for media-
tion, Vermittlung, recognisability. It appears in a need to show something that does
not fit any given narration, neither political, nor scientific, nor biographical. Making
the space for this contingent necessity is the mark of this subject. But this is not a
call for authenticity. The real of truth is realized only in pieces, part-objects, breaks,
sentences that are non-sequiturs, never fully, and never as a whole. Certainly it
appears in a kind of resistance to the narcissistic recognition of being recognized
rather than answered.
The subject of curating is not, as tempting as this may often be, a subject of
the master, but neither is it a subject of the university. It is, like the artist him- or
herself, or like the analyst, a subject of a praxis. This has far-reaching consequences
for the issue of legitimation. The point is not to resist “professionalization” or the
Discourse of the University: the point is to not use it as a legitimating force but in
order to sharpen one’s eye and one’s ear, one’s skin, and one’s body to what is
impossible within the discourse of science and its place in materialist democratic
culture. This is not an easy task: the entire history of aesthetics has been a history
of illusions created by the attempt to integrate the other of reason into the pur-
view of reason itself, the other of universality into universality itself, the other of
finite materiality into infinite thought itself—or, more recently, vice versa. Inclusion
fails to keep open the difference between science and practice. Practice articulates,
and does so in the end without justification. In order for this not to lead to obscu-
rantism, a celebration of irrationality or simply back into a kind of humanism of
meaning and culture, every subject of curating has to organize itself around not
only the doing but the thinking. The subject of curating can be located where its
actions are: i.e. selecting, processing, documenting, localizing, contextualizing, and
re-contextualizing, etc. Its actions are at the same time paralleled by an attempt to
develop a theory of those very actions and within those activities. A subject of
curating appears not only in the locations, connections, and presentations, not only
in institutions or anti-institutions, not only in the realm of appearance itself, but in
the discourse he or she produces. The difference will be how and to what extend
this work is “true”, i.e. works out a subjective impossibility in relating what is being
said to the Discourse of the Master and, more importantly, the Discourse of the
University. There might be silent artists, though less and less so it seems, for their
silence will be heard or seen or felt or brought to experience in some manner. But a
silent curator refuses or denies the subject position that he or she is in. Thus, the
issue is, what can break this silence. You will laugh, no one has ever heard of a silent
curator! But chattering [in/about] the new mode, the newest trend, the newest
discovery, the hip stuff, the counter-hip hip stuff: that is not breaking a silence.
Thus, to the question what will break it, there will not be one answer but only as

many answers as there are subjects of curating. But for this to be heard, maybe one
needs to leave the university. This implies that the subject of curating needs its own
place of speech. Not only the university, not only the institutions of art, not only
the venues of publication or the net. But, like psychoanalysts, a place where one can
listen to oneself in the ears of other subjects of curating, not in order to gain any-
thing but simply to register in oneself and the other if something of the truth that is
impossible appears. If the university is to be made a place for curating, its disciplines
and registers, then it can succeed only if it is doubled, countered, by what I want to
call anti-institutions, little sects of curator subjects. This does happen. But it is
important to realize that what is at stake is not networking, ideas exchange, or
alliances. But a space where something can be heard that only those can hear that
have no need to understand or to mediate it. Thus, while those anti-institutional
groupings of subjects of curating exist, it might be useful to realize the conditions
of its necessity—and impossibility.
The talk was delivered at the symposium Curating as a Glittering Myth,

Curating as a Social Symptom, Curating as a Revolutionary Force?, concept Dorothee
Richter, Zurich 2014, Zürich University of the Arts.
It was first published in Lou Cantor / Clemens Jahn (eds.), Turning Inward.
Texts by John Beeson, Svetlana Boym, Marta Dziewańska, Philipp Ekardt, Felix
Ensslin, Orit Gat, David Joselit, William Kherbek, John Miller, Reza Negarestani,
Matteo Pasquinelli, Dieter Roelstraete, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015, S. 158–179.
Felix Ensslin is a philosopher, curator, dramaturge and director. Among other

exhibitions, he curated Berlin Noir at Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York and Zur
Vorstellung des Terrors - Die RAF-Ausstellung (“Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition”
with Ellen Blumenstein and Klaus Biesenbach at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin,
and at Kunstmuseum Graz) as well as between two deaths at ZKM Karlsruhe (with Ellen
Blumenstein). He is co-editor of the series subjektile (formerly diaphanes, now Turia + Kant)
and founding member of pli – Psychoanalyse nach Lacan (“pli – Psychoanalysis According
to Lacan”; Stuttgart, Hamburg, Berlin, Paris, München). Aesthetics of the Flesh is his most
recent publication (as co-editor; release date is November 2014, Sternberg Press). Since
2009 he is a Professor for Aesthetics and Art Education at Staatliche Akademie der
Bildenden Künste Stuttgart.
References Mass. ; London: Belknap, 2004.

Aristotle. “Categories.” In The Complete Works Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow. Michel
of Aristotle, Vol. 1, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Prince- Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. 1. publ.
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982.
———. “Metaphysics.” In The Complete Works of Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1
Aristotle, Vol. 2, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, The Will to Knowledge. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984. ———. “The Subject and Power.” In Michel
Badiou, Alain. Logics of Worlds : The Sequel to Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, by
Being and Event. London: Continuum, 2008. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 208–26, 1. publ.
Benjamin, Walter. “Goethe’s Elective Affini- Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982.
ties.” In Selected Writings. Vol. 1 1913-1926, edited by Freud, Sigmund. “Remembering, Repeating
Marcus Paul Bullock and Michael W. (Michael Wil- and Working-Through.” In The Standard Edition of the
liam) Jennings, 297–360. Cambridge, Mass. ; London: Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. 12,
Belknap, 2004. 144–56. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute
———. “The Concept of Criticism in German of Psycho-analysis, 1958.
Romanticism.” In Selected Writings. Vol. 1 1913-1926, Graham, Beryl., and Sarah Cook. Rethinking
edited by Marcus Paul Bullock and Michael W. Curating: Art after New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
(Michael William) Jennings, 116–200. Cambridge, Press, 2010.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts 6 Here the authors cite Alex Galloway. Ibid., 57.
of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. New 7 Ibid., 83.
York ; London: W.W. Norton, 1981. 8 Ibid., 5.
———. “The Freudian Thing.” In Ecrits: The First 9 cf. Ibid., 82f.
Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink, 1 10 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1
edition., 334–64. New York: W. W. Norton & Com- The Will to Knowledge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990).
pany, 2007. 11 Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel
———. The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. New York ; Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 1. publ.
London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007. (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), 48–58.
———. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan : On Feminine 12 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,”
Sexuality : The Limits of Love and Knowledge : Book XX. in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneu-
Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, tics, by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 1. publ.
1998. (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), 212.
Pfeffer, Susanne. Speculations on Anonymous 13 cf. Ibid., 208.
Materials. Exhibition Booklet. Accessed December 2, 14 Ibid., 221.
2014. http://www.fridericianum.org/files/pdfs/733/ 15 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan :
booklet-speculations-on-anonymous-materials-en. On Feminine Sexuality : The Limits of Love and Knowledge :
pdf. Book XX, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton,
Schade, Sigrid, and Dorothee Richter. “Ausstel- 1998), 16.
lungs-Displays.” In Ausstellungen als Kulturpraktiken des 16 Ibid., 17.
Zeigens, 57–63. Das Neue Ausstellen. Ruppichteroth: 17 cf. Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psycho-
Kunstforum-Verl., 2007. analysis (New York ; London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007).
Schlegel, Friedrich. Philosophical Fragments. 18 Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg, eds.,
Translated by Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: Univ Of “Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global
Minnesota Press, 1991. Age,” in Contemporary Art and the Museum: A Global
Weibel, Peter, and Andrea Buddensieg, eds. Perspective (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz : [Distributed in
“Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global the] U.S.A/North America, D.A.P., Distributed Art
Age.” In Contemporary Art and the Museum: A Global Publishers, 2007), 27f.
Perspective, 16–38. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz : [Distrib- 19 Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments,
uted in the] U.S.A/North America, D.A.P., Distributed trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minne-
Art Publishers, 2007. sota Press, 1991), 31.
Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics of the Real : Kant and 20 Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism
Lacan. London: Verso, 2011. in German Romanticism,” in Selected Writings. Vol. 1
1913-1926, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock and Michael W.
(Michael William) Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.;
Notes London: Belknap, 2004), 132ff.
1 A version of this article was presented as the 21 Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective
keynote address of CURATING: Glittering Myth, Social Affinities,” in Selected Writings. Vol. 1 1913-1926, ed.
Symptom, Revolutionary Force? A Conference on Curatorial Marcus Paul Bullock and Michael W. (Michael Wil-
Knowledge Production on November 15, 2014 at the liam) Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Belknap,
Zürcher Hochschule der Künste. 2004), 297–360.
2 cf. Susanne Pfeffer, Speculations on Anonymous 22 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: The Sequel to
Materials. Exhibition Booklet, 3, accessed December 2, Being and Event (London: Continuum, 2008), 1ff.
2014, http://www.fridericianum.org/files/pdfs/733/ 23 Ibid., 4.
booklet-speculations-on-anonymous-materials-en. 24 cf. Ibid., 1–9.
pdf. 25 cf. Aristotle, “Metaphysics,” in The Complete
3 Sigrid Schade and Dorothee Richter, “Auss- Works of Aristotle, Vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Prince-
tellungs-Displays,” in Ausstellungen als Kulturpraktiken ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984).
des Zeigens, Das Neue Ausstellen (Ruppichteroth: Kun- 26 cf. Aristotle, “Categories,” in The Complete
stforum-Verl., 2007), 59. Works of Aristotle, Vol. 1, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Prince-
4 Beryl. Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984).
Curating: Art after New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT 27 Jacques Lacan, “The Freudian Thing,” in
Press, 2010). Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce
5 Ibid., 6. Fink, 1 edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,

2007), 361.
28 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Con-
cepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New
York; London: W.W. Norton, 1981), 6.
29 cf. Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeat-
ing and Working-Through,” in The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol.
12 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psycho-analysis, 1958), 144–56.
30 For Lacan’s rewriting of necessity, contin-
gency and impossibility see for example Lacan, The
Seminar of Jacques Lacan, 94.
31 Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant and
Lacan (London: Verso, 2011).

Curating with/in the System Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research
Curating with/in
the System
by Sabeth Buchmann
“Art without Artists?” It was under this alarmist title that, two years ago, the
artist and e-flux co-founder Anton Vidokle criticized curators for claiming the
status of artists and critics in an inadmissible manner. His finding was not new. It
had already been a topic of discussion in the late sixties, when the curator and critic
Lucy R. Lippard was accused of using the exhibitions she designed after the manner
of the Concept Art of her day to stylize herself as an artist who regarded other
artists merely as a medium.1 The polemic set forth by her colleague Peter Plagens in
Artforum was a response to the first of the so-called “numbers exhibitions” Lippard
staged between 1969 and 1973 in various locations and named after the size of the
respective town’s population: 557,087 (Seattle Art Museum, 1969), 955,000 (Van-
couver Art Gallery, 1970), 2,972,453 (Centro de Arte y Comunicación in Buenos
Aires, 1970) and c. 7500 (California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California,
1973). The exhibition catalogues were loosely bound bundles of 5x8-inch index
cards designed by the participating artists and exchanged and supplemented by
new ones from one venue to the next. This flexible and modular exhibition and
publication model points on the one hand to the predilection—typical of Concept
Art at the time—for mundane information design as well as non-hierarchical compi-
lations and the equal value of objects, idea sketches, texts, drawings, photographs,
etc. On the other hand, the catalogue texts, presented in the typewriter style typi-
cal of Concept Art, were integrated into this system of artists’ contributions, and
the degree to which they thus lost their special status was equalled by the degree
to which the distinction between artistic and curatorial stances and methods was in
fact subject to negotiation.
It is precisely here that the crux of a new curatorial spirit seems to manifest
itself – the spirit that echoes in Vidokle’s article and that, as is exemplified (not
only) by Lippard’s projects, bears a relation to the development of a “curatorial
system” (Magda Tyzlik-Carver) beginning to make itself felt in the late sixties. What
is meant here, more specifically, are collaborative practices organized in socio-tech-
nological networks and comprising not only art, but also—as proposed by Maurizio
Lazzarato—interfaces of immaterial work and immaterial goods and extending to
encompass the areas of education, knowledge, and information.2 As will become
evident in the following, Tyzlik-Carver’s definition of the term “curatorial system”
bears similarities to Lippard’s exhibition models, which—in the spirit of the virulent
critique of hierarchy prevalent in the late sixties—were directed against conven-
tional principles of selection and ranking, and which reveal an interest in themes
and discourses pertinent to art and related fields. For example, curators and critics
like Lippard relativized their own power of decision and judgement and declared
themselves collaborators of—and on an equal footing with—the artists: a shift
prompted as much by the latter as by the former; after all, artists had begun to
integrate curatorial and art-critical elements and discourses into their work, from
work to text to exhibition. This phenomenon heralds the departure from rigid
object forms in favour of the communicative situations and socially conceived

media praxis cited by Helmut Draxler in relation to post-conceptual practices

around 1990,3 which advanced to become a standard (however controversial)
within a discourse and exhibition praxis of an anti-institutional nature. What is
astonishing about Vidokle’s statement, against this background, is his claiming of a
standpoint supposedly outside the system and oblivious to this historical context.
The following will nevertheless take a closer look at whether, and in what
respect, the ousting of artists criticized by Vidokle is foreshadowed in concepts
such as the “numbers exhibitions”, or whether Lippard’s projects offer points of
departure for a critical discussion of the present-day manifestations of the “curato-
rial system”, which do without the trite recall of conventional role models. This
question is also significant in the sense that Lippard’s exhibitions were not isolated
experiments. If there is mention here of parallels to contemporary manifestations
of the “curatorial system”, then it is also because her exhibitions bore a direct rela-
tion to her publicistic activities. The latter included the production of anthologies
as well as a non-profit circulation operation bearing the name “printed matter”
co-founded by Lippard in the mid-seventies. “Systemic” activities of this kind could
be equated with the politics of publicity directed towards expanded publics, i.e.
towards the accessing of a cultural milieu with limited purchasing power, and ana-
lyzed by Alexander Alberro in connection with the group around the legendary
gallery owner Seth Siegelaub4 —a praxis based on the assumption of a cultural pri-
macy of information and communication media and encountered again today in
enterprises such as e-flux. In the latter, however, it presents itself as an expression
of an advanced network economy in which commercial and non-commercial activi-
ties merge (the latter including the exhibition and event spaces run by e-flux as well
as an online magazine), and which can serve as an example of the degree to which
the international goings-on in the areas of art, exhibition, and art criticism have
meanwhile become interwoven.
It is thus difficult to explain the success of a globally operating enterprise

such as e-flux outside the “curatorial systems” presently in the process of taking
their gloves off with regard to what has long since become canonical critique of the
anachronistic image of the (lone) artist. All the more astonishing is it that Vidokle—
who definitely has a point with his attacks on presumptuous curator behaviour—
wants to reverse this trend, which is part of the organizational form of e-flux. Pre-
cisely against the background of Lippard’s projects, which deliberately relativized,
combined, or reproduced traditional institutional roles and reinforced coopera-
tively conceived aspects of presentation, mediation, and distribution as opposed to
author-centric forms, it proves questionable to want to disentangle artistic and
curatorial concerns to the degree of unambiguity suggested by Vidokle. Such argu-
mentation would merely amount to the suggestion of the solipsistic role concep-
tions that artists once revolted against, among other things with the aim of taking
the curating business into one’s own hands and thus challenging the curators’ role.
This challenge was programmatically taken on by, for example, the exhibi-
tions designed by Siegelaub in catalogue format such as January 5–31 (1969), as well
as by Lucy R. Lippard’s exhibition and book projects. Conceiving of themselves as
“organizer and editor”, both exhibited a new understanding of the curator’s role.
What is more, as emphasized by Cornelia Butler, MoMA curator and the author of
the main essay in the publication on the “numbers exhibitions”,5 Lippard’s exhibi-
tions were essentially a new type of non-thematic group show. However strongly
influenced she was by the painting of the fifties and sixties, Lippard showed almost
no paintings in her “numbers exhibitions”. On the contrary, quite in keeping with
(Post-)Minimalism and Conceptualism, the latter were dominated by sculpture in

the broadest—i.e. in the process-oriented, place-specific and temporary—sense, as

well as photography, film, sound art, and text-based works.6 In comparison to
Siegelaub, who operated as the ally and dealer of a few exclusively male New York-
ers,7 Lippard featured in her “numbers exhibitions” far greater and more heteroge-
neous constellations of works by artists living between the American East and West
coasts as well as in Canada, Argentina, and the United Kingdom. In this respect, as
Butler points out, Lippard’s projects approximated the type of group show also
successfully staged by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1969 under the
title Live in your Head: When Attitudes Become Form,8, and thus offer a new perspec-
tive on his status as the originator of the contemporary, international group exhibi-
tion, a reputation that tends to be considered singular.9 To the extent that the focus
was primarily on attitudes, methods, and communicative situations rather than on
the selection of a few big artist names, this then-popular group show format defi-
nitely exhibited non-hierarchical traits. Yet, whereas in the case of Szeemann this
amounted to the elevation of the curator to the status of an “exhibition auteur”,
Lippard positioned herself much more prosaically and modestly. In retrospect, for
example, Lippard characterized her curatorial activities as that of a “compiler”10—a
self-description that is to be considered against the background of her editing/
publishing projects.
From 1964 onward, Lippard wrote for art magazines such as Artforum, where
she served for a time as editor-in-chief, and Art International, where she had a regu-
lar column, but she increasingly questioned this role. Her work as a freelance cura-
tor, on the contrary, which came to dominate her activities from 1966 onward,
offered her a means of shedding what she considered the parasitic role of art
critic.11 The degree to which she conceived of herself as an art producer—concur-
rently with her increasing emphasis on political activism (within the framework of
the anti-Vietnam protests as well as labour-union and feminist agendas)—corre-
sponds to the degree to which she rejected the art critics’ power of definition
derived from their quasi-institutional status, but also the conventional conceptions
of “connoisseurship”12 and good taste. It was in this phase as well that she and John
Chandler jointly published the essay “The Dematerialization of the Art Object”
(1968). The text formulated the proposition—as popular and at the same time as
controversial then as it is now13—that the traditional material-object paradigm was
dissolving in favour of idea and process-oriented, temporary and ephemeral, sci-
ence/scholarship-compliant, performative and communicative work forms. Charac-
teristically, their often textual complexion—if not to say their morphology—is mir-
rored in the anthology Lippard published five years later: Six Years: The
Dematerialization of the Art Object (1973). Entirely in the style of the Concept Art of
the time, the book’s cover offers a summary description of its content: “A cross-ref-
erence book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliogra-
phy into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews,
and symposia.”14 In analogy to the related aim of producing a fragmentary, but at
the same time representative, selection and documentation of “so called concep-
tual or information or idea art”,15 Lippard explains in the preface to Six Years that
the book was about “widely differing phenomena within a time span” and not
about a “movement”, and that there was therefore no “precise reason for certain
inclusions and exclusions except personal prejudice and an idiosyncratic method of
categorization that would make little sense on anyone else’s grounds.”16
Lippard’s proposal for a non-hierarchical compilation of texts thus integrates
decidedly arbitrary and self-mocking elements—an aspect that can also be applied
to the figure of the “compiler”. This is expressed in representative manner in the
strategy Butler refers to as “curating by numbers”, which construes the act of curat-
ing as something vague and unoriginal, and hence freed of overloaded claims to

creativity. This, then, is also the attitude at the core of the reciprocal relationship
between the critique of authorship, of the work and of the institution set up in her
exhibitions, an approach designed to confuse conventional role models and compe-
tences and exhibiting certain similarities to the endeavours emerging at around
the same time, as a conscious echo of the historical avant-gardes, to put concepts
of the artwork conceived exclusively in aesthetic terms into a new perspective
within the framework of media/episteme-based systems of depiction. The empha-
sis on the “technical reproducibility” (Benjamin) of the artwork manifest in the
catalogue exhibitions and artistic magazine contributions thus went hand in hand
with a programmatic dedifferentiation of the production and mediation profes-
sions. Lippard’s “numbers exhibitions”, however, adopted the role parodies popular
in the art scene of the time17 and applied them to the position of the curator.
Finally, shifts of this kind are also manifest in the intertwining of curatorial
practices and art criticism of the kind (not only) Vidokle sees at work in the pre-
sent-day exhibition system. According to Lippard, this intertwining was a logical
deterritorialization of institutional terrains: “I began to see curating as simply a
physical extension of criticism.”18 Her book Six Years accordingly functioned as a
publicistic counterpart to her “numbers exhibitions”—an analogy that corresponded
to the creed of Concept Art (and that of Siegelaub), according to which the distinc-
tion between a physical object and its linguistic proposition is merely functional
(and not fundamental) in nature. From this perspective, the analogy between cura-
torial-publicistic productions and “dematerialized art objects” appeared entirely
consistent. “It [Six Years] has also been called a ‘conceptual art object in itself’ and a
‘period-specific auto-critique of art criticism as act’.”19
What according to Vidokle can be interpreted as an inappropriate pretence

of artistic-ness on the part of the curator is expressed in Lippard’s words as a bal-
ancing act. It does not represent an a posteriori attempt to elevate her book to an
art object, but merely a reminder of its reception, which must be considered within
the context of a climate in which the vision of the equality of everyone involved in
art prevailed.20
This applies particularly to the manner in which Lippard linked the figure of
the “compiler” to that of the “writer”.21 To define curating as an act of writing and,
conversely, writing as a form of curating bears a relation to the discourses on
authorship that were particularly virulent at the time and are today a critical stand-
ard. Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” echoes in the dialectic of relativization
and expansion of role and competence profiles represented by Lippard.22. The
figure of the “compiler” can be related to the activities of collecting, researching,
archiving and translating that are based less on individual than on systemic author-
ship, activities of which artists, as we know, avail themselves to the same degree as
curators and critics. According to Cornelia Butler, the figure of the “compiler”
served to deprofessionalize one’s own praxis and to interweave the activities of the
curator with that of the art critic. This self-image thus not only went hand in hand
with a relativization of curatorial authorship, but also with an increase of power in
the sense of an expansion of the zone of criticism in such a way as to help curating
to more potency.
In Butler’s view, this reinterpretation of the curatorial is accompanied by the

fact that artists, for their part, began foregrounding the work of making: “Calling
paintings and sculpture simply ‘works’, reflecting making as a part of meaning. The
products of exhibition-making were more commonly designed as ‘projects’, align-
ing the activity of the curator more closely with the production of artists”. 23 This

idea implies a certain equation of artistic and curatorial production with Marxist
definitions of work24 that puts Lippard’s project in the context of a (post-)revolu-
tionary concept of art, characterized at the same time by a shift away from self-
contained work forms towards cybernetically conceived ones. Another aspect of
this is, as conceived by Tyzlik-Carver, the revaluation of “immaterial activities”
(from emotional work on relationships to performative actions, from service to
management functions), which according to Beatrice von Bismarck “led to a revalu-
ation of relational processes relative to autonomous products.”25
In this context, the fact—pointed out by Butler—that the “numbers exhibi-

tions” were “low-budget” projects comprising portable works and shown in small,
peripheral, underfinanced institutions is relevant. For example, in connection with
2,972,453—the “numbers exhibition” conceived for the Centro Arte y Comunicación
in Buenos Aires—Lippard spoke of the attempt to organize a “‘suitcase exhibition’ of
dematerialized art that would be taken from country to country by ‘idea artists’
using free airline tickets.”26 Her “numbers shows” can accordingly also be consid-
ered in the context of the development which art theorist Michael Sanchez ana-
lyzes in connection with forms of network-based circulation prevalent today. The
example he cites for this is the feedback-oriented website Contemporary Art Daily,
which he considers a remediation not only of an art magazine but also of the group
exhibition. At Contemporary Art Daily, he points out, the circulation of artworks and
the functional principles of social networks overlap.27 With reference to a text on
the subject by Rainer Ganahl, Sanchez sees the historical conditions for this phe-
nomenon in the curatorial practices prevalent around 1970. According to his train
of thought, a decisive reason for the popularity of international group show pro-
jects like When Attitudes Become Form lies in the significant reduction in the price of
airline tickets and the resulting higher circulation speed. Meanwhile, he observes,
we observe an increase from “jet speed to light speed” and a “curating tempo” that
has “sped up to rival that of the RSS feed.”27 Whereas in the context of the climate
prevailing around 1970 it seemed logical for cooperation-minded curators and
critics to avail themselves of seemingly “dematerialized” work forms—above all
language as a medium allegedly independent of profit-oriented ownership claims—
today such practices are accordingly returning as technically advanced media for-
mats adapted to the advanced economy of social networks. Even if he argues his
point in a manner entirely different from Vidokle, Sanchez deduces from this a
totalisation of the curatorial which, in light of Lippard, however, should be put into
perspective: after all, her reinterpretation of role models and competences is an
expression of an effort to expose their problems and contradictions and to put the
same up for discussion. In other words, Sanchez’s theory that curating today
encompasses social networks and life in general in addition to art objects sounds a
bit as if everything were being jumbled together here in order to reproduce pre-
cisely that blend that is the target of his criticism.
In light of the anti-hierarchical implication of Lippard’s figure of the “com-

piler”, the question also arises here of its significance for Vidokle’s finding according
to which one reason for the devaluation of art criticism lies in the expansion of the
curatorial. If viewed from this perspective, the figure of the “compiler” with direct-
democratic qualities in the framework of contemporary curatorial systems—the
figure whose guise artists and critics alike can slip into—would be at least as respon-
sible for the degradation of artists and critics as the assignment of the aura of the
“exhibition auteur”, criticized by Vidokle, to the curator. The struggle against politi-
cally compromised role models and representation conditions could accordingly be
observed in virtually picture-book-like manner from the perspectives of Foucault,
Deleuze, and Guattari. After all, the “curatorial system” that evolved in the period

in question shows that the critique of power goes hand in hand not only with dem-
ocratic-political strategies of self-empowerment, but also with the transversal
dissemination and reterritorialization of power functions. This is an aspect related
less to individual intentions and strategies as to structural frameworks.
Against this background, Lippard’s considerable resistance to traditional
forms of institutional legitimation can by all means be reconciled with the role she
embodies of a locally and internationally connected and recognized art historian,
art critic, curator, activist, and writer. Yet this does not suffice to regard the related
feminist deconstruction of patrilineal positions of authority and power as settled.
On the contrary, the question must be raised as to whether and how the accompa-
nying substitution of the established dichotomies of production and reception,
exhibition and publication, aesthetic and information—dualities that uphold the
prevailing divisions of labour—appears today in the guise of a “curatorial system”
that reorganizes power and hierarchy in a manner that seems unchallengeable
because it purports to be institution-critical and direct-democratic. In view of the
openly profit-oriented, market-share-grabbing networks, what this amounts to is a
diametrical reversal of the strategies of “negotiation” which, according to Beatrice
von Bismarck, picked up the thread of “the political orientation of institutional
criticism around 1970” in order to counter the “competition aspect.”28
This attitude is also expressed in Lippard’s feminist-activist espousal of the

cause of underpaid “art workers” and structurally marginalized women artists that
was to become the point of departure and reference for her firmly partisan art
criticism. In the fourth and last of her “numbers exhibitions” —c. 7500 (1973, Valen-
cia, California)—she presented exclusively women artists, thus responding to the
criticism of those artists that she indeed wrote about them, but exhibited them
only in isolated cases.29. In the foreword to her book From the Center: Feminist Essays
on Women’s Art (1976), she confesses that the women’s movement changed her
relationship to life in general and to art criticism in particular on account of her
newly acquired freedom “to respond to all art on a far more personal level. I’m
more than willing to be confessional, vulnerable, autobiographical, even embarrass-
ing, if that seems called for.”30 It goes without saying that such intimate avowals
were founded in the feminist conviction that the private is political—a conviction
meanwhile corrupted in view of the omnipresent pressure to publish. Lippard untir-
ingly gave verbal expression to the conditions of isolation, exclusion, and uncer-
tainty under which, in her perception, a large majority of the women artists she
wrote about in her compilations produced their work. The style of her art criticism
thus appears to have been personally and politically motivated to equal degrees.
Lippard took her politicisation as an opportunity to put her authority up for negoti-
ation once again and to present herself as an autodidact. As she continued in her
foreword, she herself had been compelled to learn the vocabulary of art criticism
anew from the women artists’ reports on their experiences so as to be able to
convey an authentic language, i.e. one not based on traditional male-oriented pat-
terns. With the aim of promoting and spreading such a language, Lippard spoke
out, in a suspiciously essentialist vein, in favour of separate art schools, collections,
museums, etc. Thanks to her curatorial concept of the “compiler”, she did not
merely propagate the “three prominent exceptional women”,31 but proposed a
representative grouping that did justice to the multifariousness of the approaches
pursued by women artists in her day. We undoubtedly have this form of discursive
“curating” to thank for the fact that, not only in Lippard’s own exhibitions, the
proportion of women artists increased substantially, at least for a time.
Disappointed by the way the (primarily male) concept artists clung to the
mechanisms of the art market, Lippard would soon recognize the naivety of social

utopias—such as that of the non-hierarchical language—and how they in fact partici-

pate in power politics.32 Nevertheless, it was evidently necessary to subscribe to
such utopias in order to achieve the destabilization of institutional labour division
and thus to expose the prevailing politics of exclusion and conditions of representa-
tion. Lippard’s models of the proliferation and flexible diversification of role and
competence profiles ultimately appear to correspond, to an extent, to present-day
performance expectations. The same can be said of the reciprocity of de-hierarchi-
zation and power gain, as well as the revaluation of immaterial / devaluation of
material work. And anyone who today speaks out on behalf of dispossessed and
disenfranchised artists would be well advised to recognize the political potentials,
but also the contradictions, of a “curatorial system” which, at least in Sanchez’s
view, may soon degrade power-crazy curators to an anachronistic footnote—unless
of course they turn up again in the guise of the system administrators who, as was
recently the case at the Berlin Biennale, arrange chairs in a circle and announce
their visions of non-hierarchical cooperation in the framework of e-flux and Con-
temporary Art Daily.33
Sabeth Buchmann is art historian and critic, based in Berlin and Vienna, Professor
of the History of Modern and Postmodern Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.
Together wih Helmut Draxler, Clemens Krümmel, and Susanne Leeb she co-edits of PoLyPen.
a series on art criticism and political theory, published by b_books, Berlin). Publications
include: Textile Theorien der Moderne. Alois Riegl in der Kunstkritik (ed. with Rike Frank,
Berlin: b_books/ PoLyPen, 2015), Hélio Oiticica, Neville D’Almeida and others: Block-Exper-
iments in Cosmococa. London 2013 (with Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz ), and Film Avantgarde
Biopolitik , Vienna 2009 (ed. with Helmut Draxler and Stephan Geene), Denken gegen das
Denken. Produktion – Technologie – Subjektivität bei Sol LeWitt, Yvonne Rainer und Hélio
Oiticica, Berlin_ b_books/ PoLyPen, 2007; Art After Conceptual Art (ed. with Alexander
Alberrro), Cambridge/ Mass.: MIT und Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König
(Generali Foundation Collection Series), 2006.
Notes
1 See Peter Plagens, “557,087”, Artforum, November 1969, pp. 64 67.
2 See Magda Tyzlik-Carver, “Interfacing the commons: Curatorial system as
a form of production on the edge”, online at: http://www.kurator.org/media/
uploads/publications/essays/public-interfaces/tyzlik-carver.pdf (accessed 1 July
2015).
3 Helmut Draxler, Die Gewalt des Zusammenhangs. Raum, Referenz und
Repräsentation bei Fareed Armaly (Berlin: b_books, 2007. Also see the project curated
by Draxler in 1989/90 for the Museum in Progress, Vienna, “Message as Medium”:
http://www.mip.at/persons/helmut-draxler (accessed 1 July 2015).
4 Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2004).
5 Cornelia Butler, “Women – Concept – Art: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers
Exhibition”, in idem et al., From Conceptualism to Feminism. Lucy Lippard's Numbers
Shows 1969–74 (London: Afterall, 2012), pp. 24–31. The foreword I wrote for that
volume served as the basis for this essay.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 See Christian Rattemeyer et al., Exhibiting the New Art: ‘Op Losse Schroeven’
and ‘When Attitudes Become Form’ (London: Afterall, 2010).
9 See Michael Sanchez, “Contemporary Art Daily”, in Isabelle Graw, Daniel
Birnbaum and Nikolaus Hirsch, eds., Art and Subjecthood: The Return of the Human

Figure in Semiocapitalism (Berlin: Sternberg, 2011), pp. 53 61, here p. 54. Sanchez
refers to Rainer Ganahl for this attribution.
10 See Lucy R. Lippard, “Curating by Numbers”, Tate Papers, 12, 2009, n. p.,
accessible online at: http://www.tate.org.uk/download/file/fid/7268 (accessed 1
July 2015).
11 See Lucy R. Lippard, “Introduction: Changing since Changing”, in idem,
From the Center, Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York and Toronto: Dutton,
1976).
12 Cornelia Butler compares this outlook with that of Marcia Tucker. The
entropic character of process-oriented art forms that dominated exhibition
activities in the late sixties evidently also challenged institutionalized role profiles.
13 This criticism was aimed at the one-sided idealization of idealist, intellec-
tual and rationalist concepts. See, for example, Pamela M. Lee, “Das konzeptuelle
Objekt der Kunstgeschichte”, Texte zur Kunst, 21, 1996, pp. 120 29, here p. 126.
14 See Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years. The Dematerialization of the Art Object from
1966 to 1972 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997)
(previously published in New York: Praeger, 1973), cover.
15 Ibid., p. 3.
16 Ibid., p. 5.
17 Frank Stella, for example, declared himself a “housepainter”, and Sol
LeWitt an “office worker”.
18 See Lippard 2009 (see note 10).
19 Ibid.
20 The dedifferentiation of the work and its mediation that goes hand in
hand with the normative, authoritative judgement also entails problems, as it
derives its legitimation – as in Lippard’s case – by citing subjective preferences and
a closeness to her chosen artists: how much more exclusive and obscure must such
criteria have seemed in view of the in-group behaviour also characteristic of
present-day networks?
21 See Butler 2012 (see note 5).
22 Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” first appeared in print in no.
5/6 of the art magazine Aspen edited by Brian O’Doherty in 1967.
23 Butler 2012 (see note 5).
24 Ibid.
25 Beatrice v. Bismarck, “Kuratorisches Handeln. Immaterielle Arbeit
zwischen Kunst und Managementmodellen”, in Marion von Osten, ed., Norm der
Abweichung (Zürich and New York: Edition: Voldemeer, 2003), p.88.
26 Quoted in Butler 2012 (see note 5); first appeared in Lucy R. Lippard,
“Escape Attempts”, in Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, eds., exh. cat. Reconsidering
the Object of Art (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), pp. 17 39.
27 Ibid., p. 54.
28 Bismarck 2003, (see note 25), p. 11.
29 See Alexandra Schwartz’s interviews with Mierle Laderman Ukeles and
Agnes Denes in Butler et al. 2012 (see note 6).
30 Lippard 1976 (see note 11), p. 2.
31 On this subject, see Isabelle Graw, Die bessere Hälfte. Künstlerinnen des 20.
und 21. Jahrhunderts (Köln: DuMont, 2003).
32 See Lucy R. Lippard 1995 (see note 26).
33 I am grateful to Søren Grammel for an illuminating discussion of this
topic.

Are Boyotts the New “Collective Curating?” Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research
Are Boycotts the New

t
“Collective Curating?”
by Sergio Edelsztein
Much has been said and written about the increasing internationalization of
the art world. This text will focus on one specific manifestation of such internation-
alization: boycotts, whose effects are felt in the local sphere as well.
The cost of curating and producing institutional exhibitions and programs is

rising dramatically, fostered by the rising cost of art itself (in many ways related to
the trend in creating site-specific projects). Simultaneously, state funding is being
cut dramatically, so the need for private and corporate sponsors is steadily increas-
ing. “Luckily,” corporations and wealthy individuals who sponsor artistic production
and presentation are, in spite of the financial crisis—or possibly because of it—
wealthier than ever. (For example, during the 2008 recession the art market not
only continued to surge, but in fact grew dramatically.) This internationality is
fuelled by the increased participation of emerging economies such as those in the
Persian Gulf, Latin America, India, and China that offer an alternative to West
European and North American hegemony within the art market. In such places,
small groups of economically powerful individuals build museums and initiate inter-
national art shows and fairs. These are often devoid of roots in the local culture and
tradition, and disregard the basic human condition of the inhabitants of these
places, which are often run by mildly dictatorial regimes or, at least, governments
with poor human rights records. Thanks to the Internet and global television net-
works, people have a relatively clear picture of the internal politics, institutional
mechanisms, and sponsors’ human rights records from anywhere in the world.
The increasing number of calls for boycotts in the art world stem from this
reality, where we all feel at home anywhere in the world, and feel comfortable
expressing ethical approval or reprobation about any issue. Dave Beech writes in
“To Boycott or not to Boycott” (Art Monthly, Oct. 2014, page 380) that, “Artists
who boycott large survey exhibitions represent the first serious challenge to the rise
of the curator and the corporate sponsor that have shaped the neoliberal art insti-
tution. Putting aside the content of each boycott, therefore, we can say that the art
boycott generally is a method for renegotiating the balance of power within art.”
Boycotts epitomize the neoliberal art institutions, and while they effectively rene-
gotiate the position of the curator, their effects in the long run are pernicious to art
institutions at large.
Boycotts organized by artists typically oppose two entities: sponsors, charac-

terized by what we might call “dirty money,” and institutions, as a protest against
various curatorial and management decisions. I am currently working with an insti-
tution in Poland being boycotted by local artists who disapprove of the municipali-
ty’s handing it over to a private company to run. A museum in Israel is being boy-
cotted in protest of the way the curator was fired. Most of these boycotts have a
specific purpose: to remove an official or sponsor, or to protest bad management.
In this text, I take the examples of more high-profile events that have rocked the

art world in the last couple of years, though naturally, motives, strategies, and
results might also be interpolated into smaller, local events.
The issues surrounding boycotts in the art world are complex, raising ques-
tions that are entire worlds unto themselves. There’s the “why” (is the issue burning
enough?), the “whom” (in the case of local or international artists boycotting a local
or international event), the timeline of “when,” and of course “how.” Though moti-
vated by diverse reasons, the boycott process is relatively uniform: a petition is
circulated and once there are enough signatories, if the demands have not been
met, the boycott is called.
A boycott is nothing more than a withdrawal and is decidedly not a form of

activism. The demands of a boycott are always both too specific, and not specific
enough, depending on the scope of the reading. Questions such as “Whom are you
punishing?” and “What price are you prepared to pay?” are seldom raised. Imposing
one’s moral judgment unto others and asking them to act upon it is a slippery slope
that can easily, if not inevitably, lead to hypocrisy and double standards.
Last summer British critic JJ Charlesworth wrote:
It’s hard to decide what is worst about the idea of a cultural boycott […] Is it that
there’s something inherently repugnant about artists and intellectuals – a demo-
graphic you might think was more committed than most to openness, freedom of
expression and internationalism – trying to close down the artistic freedom of their
peers, in order to make a political gesture of disapproval […] Or is it that in cam-
paigning for what is essentially a form of censorship, those calls for a cultural boycott
contribute, unwittingly, to the now-familiar process of demonization of those states
that we ‘over here’ disapprove of? Is it that in their obsessive focus on a particular
country and its actions, campaigners for boycotts effectively reinforce the sense of
moral superiority that always seems to attach to ‘us’ […] over ‘them’.
This quote was taken from a response to the calls for boycotting Israel
according to the BDS movement in general and the Cultural and Academic Boycott
in particular. However, these remarks address relevant questions common to all
boycotts. I should, however, note that I am the director of an art institution in
Israel, and both as a member of this institution, and as a cultural practitioner, I am
increasingly experiencing the effects of the BDS movement. I will not elaborate on
this specific boycott nor on any of the events related to it—like the Mattress Factory
case, the Creative Time one, or the São Paulo Biennial. I am not evading this issue
because it’s close and involves me, but rather because I think it is a unique case that
does not belong in the same basket as the other boycotts.1 Still, as the oldest and
longest “boycott” movement, it has to be mentioned here as an inspiration for
action and involvement, showing the way to other movements like a beam of light.
Below are summaries of a few relevant boycotts that highlight some develop-
mental points relevant to understanding covert potentials and dangers. These
descriptions are informed by the study Chen Tamir published in March on the
website Hyperallergic called “A Report on the Cultural Boycott of Israel.” (Tamir is a
curator working with me at the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv and has
been researching the progress of the BDS and other movements for some time.)
Case I: The 2014 Sydney Biennial

Before the opening of this event, a boycott was called targeting the Biennial’s
major sponsor, Transfield, a multinational corporation that, among other services
like waste management and public transport, is involved in building and managing

Australia’s offshore detention centres for asylum seekers. Illegal immigration from
around the Pacific is one of Australia’s major controversies. The boycott began with
a statement signed by ninety-two artists, followed by much public debate. It spread
to boycotting Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art because of its ties to Trans-
field and the Biennial. Eventually, the Sydney Biennial’s Chairman of the Board, Luca
Belgiorno-Nettis, who also was the CEO of Transfield, stepped down. Funding from
Transfield will be discontinued after the next Biennial, which had initially been
founded by the Transfield founder and former CEO, Belgiorno-Nettis’ father.
What is interesting about this boycott is not only its high international pro-
file, but the question of what made this year’s Biennial, after over forty years of
Transfield sponsorship, the one to be boycotted? Why now? Perhaps it’s the result
of a “snowball” effect spurred on by other international boycotts over the past two
years.
Case II: Manifesta X, The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, 2014
A few months before Manifesta’s opening in June 2014, the Russian govern-
ment passed anti-gay legislation that grants them the power to arrest suspected
gay people, including tourists and foreigners, as well as the forbidding of gay “prop-
aganda” and the adoption of Russian children by foreign gay couples. A petition
was circulated, lobbying Manifesta to relocate. Around this time, Russian forces
occupied the Crimean peninsula and essentially initiated the takeover of Ukraine. A
second petition was circulated with the same goal of relocating Manifesta in pro-
test of Russian aggression there. Manifesta responded with a statement that it
would continue as planned with the belief that “the Biennial acts as a catalyst for
local and international artistic life. […] We believe cancelling the project plays
directly into the current escalation of the ‘cold war’ rhetoric and fails to acknowl-
edge the complexity of these geo-politics.” A few artists withdrew, but the vast
majority remained. The curators maintained that the show is “political in a larger
context” and that displaying contemporary art in Russia is itself a strong statement
for pluralism.
Artists withdrawing from Manifesta explained their decision in different

ways. Nikita Kadan, for instance, withdrew because he felt Manifesta was a “project
contributing to the ideological facade of Putinist Russia and its normalization on
the international scene.” The collective Chto Delat? decided to withdraw after a
statement by chief curator Kaspar König denigrated any attempt to address the
present situation in Russia by artistic means, demoting such to “self-righteous
representation” and “cheap provocation” and thus effectively pre-emptively cen-
soring them.
It is even possible, that in view of the changing political situation, the organ-
izers may have felt some degree of relief that more politically engaged artists were
leaving the show’s checklist, for fear of state and police intervention and public
reprobation. This raises some questions for the future: will artistic or organizational
decisions be influenced by fear of artistic activism? Is Manifesta’s decision to hold
the next edition in Zurich—the capital of wealth and probably the last place in
Europe where you can expect political turmoil to erupt in the next year and a half—
a consequence of the St. Petersburg conflict?
Case III: The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

In 2011, over one hundred and thirty artists signed a statement boycotting
both the Louvre and Guggenheim museums over concerns regarding the abuse and
exploitation of workers employed in the construction of these museums’ franchises

on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi. The boycott expressed that they would refuse to
cooperate with the museums until they guaranteed the workers fair conditions,
including hiring an independent monitor whose findings of the working conditions
would be published. The artists formed a group called Gulf Labor, which has con-
tinued its work since. To date, little has changed on the ground, save for a slight
improvement in working conditions that has impacted only those working on these
specific construction projects.
***
There is something in the term “boycott” that does not reflect the unique
anatomy of the “cultural” boycott. The artists boycotting the Sydney Biennial had
agreed to participate in the event knowing very well that Transfield was its main
sponsor (and had been since 1973). They must have known of the corporation’s
commercial activities. Only towards the opening, after rallying support for their
cause, did they take advantage of the PR build-up and announce their demand that
the Biennial give up Transfield funds, or else they would withdraw. It is important
to understand that the aim of these movements is not withdrawal per se, but the
raising of social issues in an urgent, imminent situation. If artists refuse to engage
right from the start—as would be the case in a consumer boycott, or in a worker
strike—there would be no resonance whatsoever in their position. In this case, art-
ists literally “used” the Biennial as a platform to raise the issues of immigration and
the franchising of detention into private hands.
One thing is certain about the high-profile boycotts mentioned above: they
succeeded in raising consciousness about important policy problems—and that is an
achievement. But besides this, how can we weigh the consequences, successes, and
downfalls of these boycotts? In the case of Manifesta, the political situation evolved
while the show was still being organized, and artists had to react according to those
developments. In terms of results, President Vladimir Putin couldn’t care less if
some artists withdrew from Manifesta, and he probably would not have even
noticed if Manifesta relocated or was cancelled in protest. Therefore, there was no
possibility of negotiating the terms of participation. Artists withdrew from what
they believed was a high-end showcase of a political regime that was quickly fading
back into darker times.
The foreign workers in the Emirates are still working under slavery condi-
tions, and the detention facility in Papua New Guinea is still in operation. Australian
policy on asylum seekers has not changed at all. As an example of a “successful”
boycott, then, whose aims were achieved? The Sydney Biennial boycott had no
effect on government policy though it did jeopardize the future of the Biennial. The
question remains of which corporations or individuals will support art events with-
out the fear of being scrutinized and criticized for the ways in which they amassed
their wealth? This issue will be crucial for the next Sydney Biennial.
When the Sydney Biennial controversy erupted, George Brandis, Australian

Minister for the Arts, responded by directing the Australia Council to deny future
funding to any exhibition or performance that “unreasonably” refuses corporate
sponsorship. These are questions that every institution and exhibition might face as
boycotting becomes more popular and institutions might need to reconsider their
funding. Individuals and corporations that sponsor art events do this for the sake of
public relations, but some also do it out of a genuine interest in and love for art
(probably spurred by their chairpersons and important shareholders)—out of a real
sense of responsibility to raise the cultural life of their country. If this is met by
criticism, rather than a positive response, they will probably stop.

This discussion should be framed within a larger one about the characteris-
tics of art funding and sponsorship. Philip Hammerton, an obscure English land-
scape painter from the late nineteenth century wrote: “The simple truth is that
capital is the nurse and governess of the arts, not always a very wise and judicious
nurse, but an exceedingly powerful one […] For Capital to support fine arts it must
be abundant – there must be superfluity.” One need not be a Marxist scholar to
know that no one made superfluous wealth by working with his or her own hands.
The making of such fortunes necessarily involves exploitation and questionable
practices.
Let us briefly consider the history of artistic patronage, leaving church and
the monarchy aside to focus on private entrepreneurs. We can begin with Enrico
Scrovegni from the fourteenth century, “heir to one of the greatest private for-
tunes ever put together in the West, whose commissioning of Giotto’s masterpiece,
the Arena Chapel frescoes, was an act of expiation for the notorious usury of the
super-rich Reginald, Enrico’s father,” (Colin Platt Marks of Opulence, pg. 38) and
fast-forward to the late nineteenth century American philanthropists Andrew
Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon, John D. Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vander-
bilt. The benefactors of the most prized American museums donated both money
and their collections of art to public institutions. They and many more were collo-
quially called the “Robber Barons,” a term coined by Mark Twain, denoting busi-
nessmen who “used exploitative practices to amass their wealth. These practices
included exerting control over national resources, accruing high levels of govern-
ment influence, paying extremely low wages, squashing competition by acquiring
competitors in order to create monopolies and eventually raise prices.” (Charles
Dole) Joseph H. Hirshhorn, for whom the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gar-
den in Washington, D.C. is named, made his fortune mining the uranium that
fuelled the United States’ atomic arsenal during the Cold War. In the time Hirsh-
horn mined for uranium, from the early 1950s to 1960s, the U.S. arsenal grew from
about 250 atomic bombs to 18,000 nuclear weapons. Yet, to the best of my knowl-
edge, no artist has ever boycotted the Hirshhorn.
Hirshhorn and his like were all also important art collectors. Many sponsor-
ing corporations are headed by collectors, and almost all sponsoring individuals
collect art. Yet, very few collectors are boycotted by artists in the context of sales,
which of course, are a private interaction. In any case, the point is that looking for
uncompromised private or corporate sponsorship is nearly impossible.
State funding allocated to art and culture in every kind of government,

including those with a record of human rights abuses, exploitative colonialism, and
even genocide, is earned through the taxes paid by the public (and also corpora-
tions) and therefore considered “cleaner” than private donations. Taking state
funds for art is like drinking water from the tap, sending children to public school,
or receiving social security or health services: a right of every citizen, and in any
case, inevitable. However, it is imperative to understand the inherent connection
between public and private spheres. Private funding comes in where public funding
falls short. Furthermore, corporations, both historical and contemporary, made and
make their wealth—whether exploiting the earth’s resources, the working class, or
the stock exchange—with the agreement and support of the government, and the
regulators who turn a blind eye to their exploitative practices. Whatever these

individuals or corporations do, it is still the hegemonic power of the state that is
responsible. They share a common and furiously defended interest.
The problem is that boycotts target the effects of hegemonic policies, but
not its causes. This might be presented as a practical choice aimed at possible and
immediate success, but in Giorgio Agamben’s view this is emblematic of modernity
and liberalization: “Causes demand to be known while effects can only be checked
and controlled,” he wrote. By the same token, boycotts target institutions and
sponsors for their excesses, but almost never criticize the power that permits such
excesses. Gulf Labor critiques labour conditions as they are dictated, not by the
Guggenheim Corporation, but by the Tourist Development and Investment Com-
pany, a government branch responsible for building the infamous cultural complex
of the Saadyiat Island by the contract and conditions imposed by the Abu Dhabi
government. But the labour conditions on this “Island of Happiness” are by no
means unique in the Gulf. Rather, they reflect the policy that built the Emirates
from the start.
Returning to the topic of sales exemptions, no call was made to boycott the
UAE as a country, especially not the Abu Dhabi Art Fair. We can only imagine the
effect of the 2000 artists that have now signed the boycott refusing their work be
shown and traded in this fair. That would surely have an impact.
The symbiosis of public and private funding is nowhere more evident than in
the case of the Guggenheim boycott, a perfect mix of all possible worlds: institu-
tion and state, economics and politics, and private and governmental funding. It
involves boycott, but also activism and unlike the other examples, it has developed
and adapted its tactics. In Manifesta Journal No. 18 there are a number of articles on
the issues of the Sydney and Guggenheim boycotts. Mariam Ghani, a member of
the Gulf Labor Working Group offers some interesting insights:
Like most long-term boycotts the Gulf Labor campaign has undergone a
number of shifts and has deployed a range of different tactics over the years
following its public launch. Gulf Labor’s most visible tactical shift came in fall
of 2013, when we launched the 52 Weeks campaign. Every week for a year,
we are releasing one or more artist’s projects. These projects call attention
to some aspect of the conditions of workers on Saadiyat Island, the political
context that enables their situation, and the problematic compact between
the western institutions building on Saadiyat and their partners in Abu
Dhabi; or they make links between the situation of the workers on Saadiyat
and similar struggles by other migrants and workers in other places and
times. 52 Weeks represents a move from the strategic use of artworks (with-
holding them, or imposing conditions on their sale, production and exhibi-
tion) as an activist tactic, to an attempt to apply the same kind of pressure
through the production and distribution of artworks that directly address or
enact that activism.
Assessing the campaign from the two-thirds mark, it seems to me that 52
Weeks and its many brilliant contributors have begun to re-imagine what a
group like Gulf Labor can be and do—how an activist project based in a boy-
cott might serve beyond that boycott, without abandoning it. 52 Weeks is a
reminder that a boycott can and should be the beginning of a larger conver-
sation, rather than a means to shut down all dialogue around an issue.
What is interesting in Ghani’s praise for the 52 Weeks project is that it

brings us back to the typical field in which artists have been addressing these issues
in an active, practical, and constructive way. Since the 1960s, artists identified the

connections between art, institutions, politics, and capital as intrinsic to all artistic
creation, turning it into the main subject matter of their works. Hans Haacke, Lou-
ise Lawler, Andrea Fraser, Daniel Buren, and Michael Asher, to name just a few, have
worked towards a mode of art described as “Institutional Critique.” Thirty years
later, Fraser herself re-checks “the historic and present-day efficacy of Institutional
Critique” and she finds a nostalgia for it as a now-anachronistic artefact of an era
before the corporate “megamuseum” and the 24/7 global art market, when artists
could still conceivably take up a critical position against or outside the institution:
Today there no longer is an outside. How, then, can we imagine, much less
accomplish, a critique of art institutions when museum and market have
grown into an all-encompassing apparatus of cultural reification? Now, when
we need it most, institutional critique is dead, a victim of its success or fail-
ure, swallowed up by the institution it stood against.
From this point of view, it is plausible that by boycotting, artists are making
an effort to withdraw from the art world, or at least from portions of it that they
identify as offensive, criticizing it “from the outside.” But, Fraser goes on to close
this possibility too:
Just as art cannot exist outside the field of art, we cannot exist outside the
field of art, at least not as artists, critics, curators, etc. And what we do out-
side the field, to the extent that it remains outside, can have no effect within
it. So if there is no outside for us….it is because the institution is inside of us,
and we can’t get outside of ourselves. (Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of
Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” Artforum, 9/2005)
Hans Haake wrote in 1974, “Artists, as much as their supporters and their
enemies, no matter of what ideological coloration, are unwitting partners […]. They
participate jointly in the maintenance and/or development of the ideological make-
up of their society. They work within that frame, set the frame and are being
framed.” But boycotting artists do not always seek to make a difference in the art
world, but outside it, using the art world as a springboard for this goal. At other
times, as demonstrated by Ghani, the struggle starts form the art world but devel-
ops beyond it.
True activist art that addresses institutions and their sponsors is found today
as well. Liberate Tate, a collective that aims at discontinuing BP’s sponsorship of the
Tate, has performed a number of interventions to heighten the pressure on
museum officials. They belong to a large coalition of groups that target oil com-
pany sponsorship of cultural events in the UK, including Platform, Reclaim Shake-
speare Company, Rising Tide, Shell Out Sounds, and others. Liberate Tate and
similar groups such as Occupy Museums reclaim Institutional Critique’s affirmative
action, as do several other organizations, mostly to disrupt the swift, codified, and
ritualized conduct of art institutions and their public, by engaging rather than with-
drawing. Beech writes: “Institutional critique reverses the ethical charge of the
boycott, using it as a rationale for participation rather than withdrawal.”
Another contemporary instance that exemplifies how far art and its institu-
tions have strayed from Institutional Critique since the 1970s involves the 2015
Venice Biennale. In his online statement, curator Okwui Enwezor explains the
rationale for recreating a framework of events that took place during the 1974
Biennale that “was dedicated to Chile, as a gesture of solidarity toward that country
in the aftermath of the violent coup d’état, in which General Augusto Pinochet
overthrew the government of Salvador Allende a year before.” Were the bloody

coup d’etat in Chile to take place today, only calls for boycott—not solidarity, activ-
ism, or demonstrations—would be heard today, at the Biennale, and everywhere
else. Just boycott.
Interestingly, perhaps even contradicting what was previously said, Ghani
arrives at the same “activistic” position, and in her report draws a limit on with-
drawal: “Ultimately, a boycott should be a tactic of last, not first, resort.” She goes
on, prescribing a three-part protocol:
1 - Public boycotts should be called only when private negotiation proves

either impossible or fruitless.
2 - A boycott should be applied only when a boycott is likely to produce
results. That is to say, a cultural boycott will work only if the creative work
being withheld has significant and immediate value to the institution or
government being boycotted. If that government or institution does not in
fact need cultural products for a specific purpose in this specific moment,
cultural workers have no leverage with that government or institution, and a
boycott will not work.
This is true for boycotts aimed at government policy in general, as in the case
with Manifesta, and is especially true of Israel. It is also true for institutions so far as
they are not engaged in the imminent opening of a major project like, for instance,
the Guggenheim. Ghani continues:
3 - If the boycott does not include a significant portion of the most visible
cultural workers necessary to the immediate purpose or project of the gov-
ernment or institution, the boycott will not work. A public boycott should
not be called until enough organization has been done to ensure a minimum
of consensus around the goal and necessity of the boycott in the community
most important to its success. If the demand behind a boycott is vague or
diffuse, the boycott will not work.
This last point is of utmost importance, for this is where massive pressure,
especially through social media and threats, becomes ugly. It is a slippery slope from
there to censorship. To boycott is to withdraw, but to pressure fellow practitioners
to join a boycott is censorship.
In an article published in The New Republic, titled “Are we Entering a New Age
of Artistic Censorship in Europe?,” Tiffany Jenkins brings a number of examples of
recent boycotts and petitions that ultimately led to the removal of artworks and
the decommissioning of theatre plays. A work by the Chapman brothers was taken
down by the MAXXI Museum in Rome last summer, deemed paedo-pornographic
by a children’s rights group. Similarly, when the protests against a play titled Exhibit
B grew fierce, the Barbican in London caved quickly, citing safety concerns. At the
beginning of November last year, organizers of the Le Mois de la Photo exhibition in
Paris gave in to a few letters of complaint, removing photographs by Diane Ducruet
of the artist cuddling and kissing her daughter. And in Germany earlier that year,
the Museum Folkwang in Essen pre-emptively cancelled a planned exhibition of
Polaroids by the French-Polish artist Balthus featuring a model called Anna who
posed for him from the age of 8 to 16. Jenkins concludes:
There are important differences between the demands for censorship of the
past and those of the present. Historically, those calling for censorship were
often concerned that an artwork—perhaps of a sexual nature—would have a
coarsening effect and a negative moral impact. Today’s activists have a dif-

ferent rationale. They argue that they are the only ones who have the right
to speak […] Why have these recent demands to censor been so successful?
It’s worth reflecting on who is protesting, because this is also different from
the earlier, top-down attempts to censor. […] Many contemporary campaign-
ers calling for boycotts are from the so-called liberal left who, it would seem,
want art to show a world they wished existed, having given up on trying to
change it.
Boycotts, and particularly their ability to censor, threaten to unleash a dis-

dain and antagonism that is intrinsic—but repressed—within large sections of our
communities, and above all, within the ruling classes and politicians. It is not a
coincidence that the polemics surrounding the Sydney Biennial were followed by a
substantial cut in the Arts Council budget. In our neoliberal capitalist system, the
institutional art world (unlike the art market) could easily be viewed as a burden on
society, a sector that can’t justify its existence economically. Intrinsic but loud
polemics like these are detached from the institutions and artworks taking over
newspaper headlines and TV slots and inspiring the involvement of bureaucrats and
politicians, especially if those polemics attack them directly as in the cases dis-
cussed here. Calls for censorship coming from prominent and respected members
of the artistic community cue further attacks on the art world’s legitimacy,
responded to first and foremost with budget cuts.
However sympathetic we are towards the causes boycotts target, as they

increase in number and visibility, regardless of their immediate success or failure,
they will have a devastating effect on the legitimacy of the institutional art world.
Smaller, “parochial” boycotts like those discussed above may cause the same effects
in the local sphere.
***
It is important to also address how boycotts and censorship have been
shaped by contemporary social behaviour and social media. Facebook easily creates
an illusion of collectivity and simplifies our ability to share our opinions and rally for
support, and many websites easily disseminate petitions or calls for action. But
beyond these, when analyzing the roots of the numerous boycotts, one must con-
sider the culture of “rating” that informs our over-opinionated positions on just
about everything. Through the use of websites such as Uber, Airbnb, and Hotels.
com, humans are constantly asked to review their experiences. Airlines, restaurants,
banks, and virtually every service asks us for our opinions. And we are also con-
stantly being rated as users and as publics. For example, the Uber app asks consum-
ers to rate their taxi drivers, but also asks drivers to rate their passengers. The goal
is to eliminate unfitting drivers, but if one day you can’t get a car to pick you up,
just think what you may have done or said in a taxi yesterday. We are constantly
pushed by the technological liberal complex to be opinionated even about things
we don’t care about, and to act upon those opinions in a way that can effectively
alter other people’s lives, without giving it much thought. Responsibility and
accountability can so easily be sacrificed for compatibility.
Can curators envision an app called “Rate Your Sponsor” where institutions,
artists, and curators rate the application process, money flow, and report proce-
dures of different sponsors? It could be an ideal open platform for activists to
upload the results of their research on the sources of sponsors’ wealth, and for
curators to use in exhibition and event production to potentially shield themselves
from boycott. But why not also create the “Rate Your Artist” app where curators
could fill in information according to their experiences working with specific artists,

rating the quality of the workflow, the reasonable-ness of the artist’s demands, etc.
Does he or she fly only in business class? What is their position on artist fees? We
could even be able to view a list of petitions and boycotts the artist has endorsed.
That way, we could work with artists with no record of boycott, or with a concep-
tual flexibility that would assure their commitment to participation under virtually
any political stress and without their looking into the details of sponsors’ activities.
These two apps together might be the essential tools for curators in the
decades to come, as exhibition costs rise, resources shrink, political instability
spreads, and artists’ political positions become unpredictable. Of course, I am being
cynical: I would never support nor use such hideous tools. But these examples
illuminate the issues we as curators will have to confront.
A separate “Orwellian” solution was contemplated by artist Ahmet Ö üt,

who proposes incorporating into institutions what he calls an “Intervenor,” which
he describes in “CCC – Currency of Collective Consciousness,” in e-flux Journal # 62,
as:
Artists, art workers, cultural workers, or academics who aren’t normally part
of the institutional decision-making mechanism, and who are aware of the
sensitivities of the local context. They would have an officially acknowledged
agreement that protects their work from financial and political interference.
They would also have a right to vet all forms of communication before they
go public. This would include announcements, press conferences, events, and
statements. Also, they would not act according to pre-programmed agendas,
concepts, exhibition schedules, or locations. Intervenors could leave when it
is no longer possible to challenge the limits of structural change. Intervenors
would be the protagonists who go beyond symbolic and harmless institu-
tionalized critical agency. They would intercede if the institution reacted in
an authoritarian or judgmental way to any public concerns.
In other contexts, the person performing this role existed. They were called
the “Kommissar.” But, in many ways the “awareness of the sensitivities of the local
context,” i.e. the need to “protect the work from financial and political interfer-
ence,” is a relevant concern that curators will have to address in their practice.
Curators will have to conceptualize not only the subject matter of an exhi-
bition, its relevance to the art world and broader public, as is done nowadays in
catalogue texts, press releases, etc. Curators will have to invest much more thought
and research into applications for funding and the interpretation of projects in the
public sphere engaging with artists’ oppositions, ideas, and political concerns to
ensure burning issues can be addressed among them and the public. Curators will
have to act as mediators between artists and institutions, defending decisions
regarding such issues in the same way, outside of the mediation already performed
in advocating for an a project’s artistic relevance. Hopefully, disagreement and
criticism might be reined back in to the principles of institutional critique, in which
artists found a worthy site of expression rather than a tool to be abandoned.
These are challenging times for curators, who will have to directly address
the political or economic issues like those mentioned above in a fresh, creative, and
active way, creating platforms for engagement and not for withdrawal while dealing
with the dangers of political correctness—perhaps one of the worst kinds of censor-
ship—and fight proselytising, condescension, colonialism, and the ignorance and
social pressure that often fuel boycotts.

*with thanks to Talia Heiman and Chen Tamir.
Sergio Edelsztein was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1956. Studied at the Tel
Aviv University (1976-85). Funded and directed Artifact Gallery in Tel Aviv (1987-1995). In
1995 founded The Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv and has been its director and
chief curator since then. In the framework of the CCA he curated seven Performance Art
Biennials and five International Video Art Biennials - Video Zone. Also curated numerous
experimental and video art screenings, retrospectives and performances events. Major exhi-
bitions curated for the CCA include, among others, shows of Guy Ben Ner, Boaz Arad,
Doron Solomons, Roee Rosen and Jan Tichy – and international artists like Rosa Barba, Ceal
Floyer, Marina Abramovic and Gary Hill. Since 1995 curated exhibitions and time-based
events in Spain, China, Poland, Singapore and elsewhere. Curated the Israeli participation at
the 24th Sao Paulo Biennial (1998) the 2005 and 2013 Israeli Pavilion at the Biennale in
Venice. Lectured, presented video programs and published writings in Israel, Spain, Brazil,
Italy, Austria, Germany, China, the USA, Argentina etc. Writes extensively for catalogues,
web sites and publications
Notes
1 There are many reasons for that, but basically, the PACBI (Palestinian
Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott), as a branch of the BDS (Boy-
cott, Divestment and Sanctions) is not a “bottom-to-top” movement, but rather
the opposite. Its guidelines closely follow the Pan-Arabic rhetoric of the last fifty
years, placing it as a hegemonic position versus another. Without clear aims or
terms of engagement, this movement should be seen as a punishment rather than
a boycott with realistic aims.

Feminist Thought and Curating: On Method Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research
Feminist Thought
and Curating: On Method
by Elke Krasny
What if there is a feminist turn in curating?1 And if so, what is it and what
does it do? Does it turn practices of curating and scholarship on the histories of
curating into a feminist enterprise? Or, does it turn feminism into the subject of
curatorial knowledge production? Or, does it turn to feminism in order to under-
stand from a feminist standpoint what curating is and what it is that curating does?
These questions raised here are central to my study of The International Dinner Party
in Feminist Curatorial Thought.
On Feminist Thought
My thesis examines The International Dinner Party within feminist curatorial
thought. I turn to feminist thought in order to analyse, historicise, theorise, and
practise curating. The conceptual framework, which I will lay out in this chapter,
draws on feminist thought as a form of practice. Thought as practice is always
situated in the concrete conditions specific to particular times and geographies.
What is of interest to me throughout this thesis are the politics of feminist thought
with regard to historiography, epistemology, and chronopolitics, and how the les-
sons gained from a critical understanding of these politics can be used to situate
curating historically and theoretically.
What follows is first a conceptual framework of feminist thought. I will

raise some key points here: feminist thought makes a claim to the non-monolithic;
feminist thought is marked by paradox and contradiction to which it responds on a
number of different theoretical, methodological, and practical levels; feminist
thought expresses a pronounced resistance to be tied down by definition; feminist
thought is in need of definition; feminist thought is in need of ongoing re/defini-
tion with regard to definition; feminist thought actively expresses resistance to
categorization; feminist thought is characterised by the quest for transformation
and the ongoing process of further differentiation from within; feminist thought
engages in a historiographical project of writing, re-writing, reflecting, and ques-
tioning the processes of knowledge-making and the resulting knowledge produc-
tion.
Secondly, I will proceed with mapping of some of feminist thought’s para-

digmatic historiographies. I seek to draw out how the key points raised above—
ranging from the non-monolithic to ongoing processes of differentiation—are ‘at
work’ in the already canonical or in the still emerging, yet already established histo-
ries and chronological narratives of feminist thought. What interests me are ways
of relating critical insights gained from an understanding of feminist thought’s
historiographies to the writing of curatorial historiography. What is at stake here
are the politics and power relations governing historiographic operations, and by
extension the epistemological implications. I refer to Susan Archer Mann to stress
the importance of such a historiographic approach. “The advantages of an histori-
cal approach are that readers can see how theories are constructed over time and
how they often develop in response to concrete historical conditions as well as to

other perspectives
t and debates they engender.”2 With reference to the work of
Marsha Meskimmon, such an historical approach needs to be troubled with regard
to any underlying assumptions of a “progressive chronology.”3 In order to specifi-
cally locate feminist thought as responses to concrete historical conditions, it is
necessary to continue working “against the grain of linear narratives of progress.”4
Meskimmon uses the work of Marxist feminist geographer Doreen Massey to
reveal how “spatial differences are reconvened as temporal sequence.”5 In order to
avoid the pitfalls of ‘uncritical chronology,’ one has to turn to “critical cartogra-
phy.”6 My mapping of feminist thought’s historiographies uses such a critical car-
tography as its method. There are important lessons to be gained from this with
respect to curatorial historiography. In doing so, special attention will be paid to the
chronopolitics at work within the concepts and operations used to construct such
historiographies.
The Opening Question/Opening the Question (Again)

I have opened this chapter with a question. The question was: What if there
is a feminist turn in curating? By starting this chapter with a question, I am actually
already deeply indebted to feminist thought’s methods. I make myself part of femi-
nist thought’s legacy by activating the question as method. What is feminism? This
question or questions similar to this have been raised and are still being raised over
and over again. I would even go so far as to say that feminism is the question.7
Posing the question of what feminism is, as I seek to demonstrate, leads to a strate-
gic resistance to any merely descriptive or simply reductive definition. A feminist
method, as one might argue, is the resistance to definition, the refusal to be tied
down by any one monolithic and definitive definition. On the other hand, the ques-
tion of what feminism is also pushes the need for ongoing processes of negotiating
re-definitions and the quest for changing definitions. The question of what femi-
nism is leads to establishing contours in order to avoid that feminism is too easily
understood as some kind of indiscriminate form of attack, as a ‘pick-as-you go’
theory or a “particularly empty terminology, a critical stance without critique.”8
This is one of the constitutive paradoxes, or contradictions, actively challenging
feminist thought. This also offered in the past, and continues to do so, a fertile
ground for a large number of different strands of feminist thought, such as liberal,
Marxist, socialist, or anarchist feminism,9 or Christian, Islamic, Judaic, Hindu, or
Buddhist feminism. Other strands of feminist thought include “psychoanalytic,
care-focused, existentialist, postmodern, women of color, global, ecofeminist,”10
poststructural, deconstructivist, intersectional, Black, Mestiza, postcolonial, deco-
lonial, cross border, transnational, indigenous, urban immigrant feminism, queer, or
transgender feminism. Considerable disputes, debates, conflicts, shared interests,
and alliances within different strands of feminist thought point to another constitu-
tive paradox. Schools, canons, labels, or strands of feminist thought cannot be
neatly separated or definitively categorized. “To be sure this list of labels is incom-
plete and highly contestable.”11 Feminist thought therefore is also marked by a
resistance to a labelling categorization and not only by a resistance to definition,
which I pointed out earlier. Even though highly contestable, such categories are
nonetheless useful tools in understanding the multiplicity politics and orientations
at work within feminist thought. They also allow for an understanding of how these
different strands of thought not only create productive debates and conflicts
within feminism, but also sharing, crossings, and all kinds of intellectual exchange
and movements that can actually lead to new associations and transgressions.
Taken together, these activities nourish the ongoing transformation of feminist
thought itself. And, as Rosemarie Tong states: “They signal to the public that femi-
nism is not a monolithic ideology and that all feminists do not think alike.”12

Turning now to curating, I will follow feminist thought’s method and raise
the following question: What is curating? Recent proliferation of theoretical dis-
course on and historiographic narration of curating clearly shows that this question
has been raised in a number of publications.13 And, having studied feminist thought,
we come to see a paradox or contradiction at work. Curating chooses to resist
definition. Curating seeks to change and expand how its past definitions are under-
stood, what its current definitions are and what its future definitions might
become. Yet, in order to be seen as a specific “area of knowledge,”14 curating and
curatorial thought are in need of some definition. And, I would like to add, such
definitions are in fact helpful in order to make the (ongoing) transformations–
which in fact often actively contest and transgress earlier models or definitions of
what curating is–better understood.,Therefore, the question also drives the need
for specificity and for contours, as I pointed out earlier with regard to feminist
thought. Again, it is a paradox that lies at the heart of curatorial thought. This
paradox unfolds as follows: the desire to be understood as a specific area of knowl-
edge and the desire to not to be tied down by restraining and narrowing defini-
tions. This also offers fertile ground for a wide range of different approaches mani-
fest in curating. These have not solidified into long-standing categories such as the
ones I named with regard to feminist thought. Nonetheless, I will attempt to sketch
out different strands that are to be discerned within contemporary curating. I will
do so firstly according to perspectives taken up by curators, secondly according to
historic periodisation and fields of artistic production, and thirdly according to sites
where curators work. With regard to the perspectives employed, these strands are
activist, critical, conceptual, discursive, educational, feminist, global, involved, post-
colonial, Black America, Chicana, global, or transnational curating/curatorial
thought. With regard to historic periodisation and fields of artistic productions,
these strands can be named as follows: modern art, contemporary art, video art,
installation art, performance art, conceptual art, postconceptual art, or digital and
new media art curator. With regard to sites of work, these strands can be named as
follows: museum, biennale, festival, gallery, education, public space, community-
based, urban, village, or theory curator. Admittedly, such a list is unfinished and
risks the danger of oversimplification. On one hand, curating/curatorial thought is
prone to introducing such self-labelling in order to work out specificities, differ-
ences, and positions. On the other hand, curating/curatorial thought is very likely
to resist such labelling as restrictive and reductive. Such (albeit tentative and pre-
liminary) labelling categorizations are seen as helpful tools to understand the differ-
ent politics and orientations at work within the emerging differences of curating.
They also allow opposing and conflicting perspectives to be traced, as well as the
emergence of productive dialogues and intellectual transgressions. This process of
differentiation into a wide number of specific strands within curating points to the
emergence of a new area of knowledge pointed out earlier. This area of knowledge
is marked by the differences within. I want to return now to what Rosemarie Tong
stated about feminist thought and use it this recitation and change to describe
curating. “They signal to the public that ‘curating/curatorial thought’ (my change) is
not a monolithic ideology and that all ‘curators’ (my change) do not think alike.”15
Even though definitions run the risk of reductionism and oversimplification,

they are, to a certain degree, necessary to arrive at differentiation and to achieve
nuanced intellectual specificity. Even though feminist thought and curating tend to
resist definitions, it is of importance to not end up with, as already stated before, a
“critical stance without critique.”16 Even though it can be understood via feminist
thought that curating also cannot be described by narrowly defined schools, nam-
ing different strands points to the complex historic and still ongoing processes of
differentiation and self-transformation. In addition, such a practice of naming can

also be understood as self-chosen, self-identifying, self-labelling, self-positioning, or

self-organising. With regard to the methods used in this study, attention is paid to
the anti-monolithic or non-monolithic. This places the focus on working out para-
doxes and contradictions as well as differences and specificities. Equally, the poten-
tial for dialogues, crossings, exchanges, and movements between different times,
sites, and perspectives as provided by feminist thought is central to historicising,
theorising, and practicing curating. What can be learned from studying feminist
thought is to turn to the question yet again. I have raised the what-is-question.
Now I will proceed with the what-does-question. What does feminist thought do?
What does doing feminist thought imply? What does curatorial thought do? What
does doing curatorial thought imply? Seen through the lens of doing, thought is a
specific social practice. Susan Archer Mann emphasises “the social agency involved
in theory production – how constructing theory is a social practice and a form of
labor.”17 She also points out that “Feminism is not simply a body of thought: it is a
politics directed toward social change.”18 I follow this line of thinking, that thought
is a specific social practice, and want to underline its importance for both feminist
and curatorial thought. While the political claim has been constitutive to the emer-
gence of feminist thought, the same cannot be said about curating. While feminist
thought can look back onto an historical claim of emerging out of the feminist
movement(s) and being directed toward social change, the situation for the latter is
quite different. Curating’s beginnings did not emerge out of political movements or
social movements, yet curating is part of (critically addressing) the politics of how
art and culture are produced, shown, mediated, analysed, and made public. Curat-
ing cannot be understood without the concrete historical conditions of which they
are a part. Therefore, I not only locate issues of politics and social change in femi-
nist thought, but also understand curating and curatorial thought as always already
profoundly entangled with political and social questions. It is specifically the femi-
nist turn in curating that foregrounds how feminist thought needs to address the
politics of curating. Feminist thought provides the methods of analysis in working
out how curating is responding to specific historic conditions and how curating
does or does not address the social changes wrought by feminism within these
specific historic conditions. Curating as a social practice is part of the historic condi-
tions which feminism seeks to change. As I have shown via Mann, Massey, and
Meskimmon, feminist thought provides the tools to confront uncritical chronology
and to activate critical cartography.
Feminist thought relies on opening up, over again and again, both of these
questions: What is feminist thought and what does feminist thought do? I will put
this method to use in order to approach and question curating. The resistance to
definition and to categorization, another legacy of feminist thought, opens up the
potentials for ongoing questioning, considerable conflicts, transformation, and
future change. The resistance to processes of stabilizing via definition is to be dis-
cerned in feminist thought. This can be used in analysing curatorial practice to
understand both such a resistance and processes of differentiation. Feminist
thought has historically emerged as a politics. Curatorial practice has emerged as a
distinctly cultural practice. In historical terms, it was bound up with hegemonic
logics of collecting, conserving, categorizing, producing, representing, and mediat-
ing art and culture. Institutions like the museum, or exhibition formats like the
biennale, are powerful expressions of representative and dominant models of cul-
ture. It was via feminist critique in the 1960s and 1970s that curating was con-
fronted with its own hegemonic and exclusionary politics. It has also been via femi-
nist critique and feminist practice that curating has undergone considerable
changes since the 1960s and 1970s. While the first is by now well understood in
museum studies and curatorial historiography, the latter still warrants future

research and thorough exploration. Looked at from this vantage point of critiquing
hegemonic power, feminist thought is useful for the analysis of curatorial practice
as an inherently social practice with regard to its (changing) politics. And, this is my
key point, feminist thought is much needed when it comes to gaining deeper
insights into how curating is addressing and making public the social changes
wrought by feminism, feminist thought, and feminist art.
On the Chronopolitics of Feminist Historiography

As noted, feminist thought is not monolithic, and feminist historiography
seeks to mobilize strategic critical resistance against the logic of linear progress.
Paradox and contradiction, as I will show in more detail later, are part of feminist
thought’s legacy and of its current transformations. Yet, there is a troubling ten-
dency to be made out within the historiography of feminism as an object of study.
Both a large number of feminist movements and the body of most diverse feminist
thought have been written into what is now a rather canonical history hinging on
chronopolitically charged terms of before versus after, pioneering versus obsolete,
older versus younger. Crucial to my chronopolitical critique of feminist thought’s
historiography are art historian Griselda Pollock’s work on paradox and Sarah
Bracke’s and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s re-reading of contradiction via feminist
standpoint theory.
What follows now is an outline mapping the conventional narratives of

feminist thought. I will move through a number of different yet closely related
narratives. As I move through these narratives, I will point out a number of chro-
nopolitical implications and contradictions. The history of feminism has been writ-
ten as a history of waves: First Wave, Second Wave, Third Wave, and, most recently,
Fourth Wave. The history of feminism has also been written in terms of pre and
post: prefeminist, feminist, postfeminist. Both the waves model and the pre/post
model suggest a “progressive chronology.”19 Susan Archer Mann points to the
linearity implied in the wave model. “No doubt, many histories of U.S. feminism
have employed a linear, wave approach.”20 Linear constructions of historical time
are inherently Eurocentric. They share common legacies with modernism, moder-
nity, progress, and universal history. Amongst many other things, feminist histori-
ography sought to actively intervene into such concepts of historical time, to
deconstruct and challenge its enduring hegemonic underpinnings, and to trans-
gress such concepts and the resulting models of constructing history via linear
narrations. First-wave feminism commonly refers to movements around suffrage
and to activities taking place through the nineteenth and the early twentieth centu-
ries. Second wave and third wave on the contrary are separated by a mere decade.
“The second wave denotes the resurgence of women’s organizing in the 1960s and
ends (…) with the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in 1982. The third
wave refers to the resurgence of feminist activism in the 1990s, especially by
younger feminists who came of age after the second wave.” The wave approach
suggests a causal linearity that is very much following a chronopolitical logic owed
to modernist ideas of progress. It is exactly such a progress-centric model of histo-
riographic narration that feminist thought rejects and deconstructs. Yet, with femi-
nism as the object of historical study, this progress-based narrative has become
canonical and hegemonic. Therefore, Mann argues for a more nuanced model of
feminism’s historiography. She offers a number of reasons why the waves model is
problematic.
First, wave approaches too often downplay the importance of individual and
small-scale collective actions as well as indirect and covert acts. Second, they
ignore feminist writings and activities before and between different waves.

Third, wave approaches generally draw attention to the common themes

that unify each wave and focus on the largest and most hegemonic feminist
organizations. Hence, they tend to obscure the diversity of competing femi-
nisms within each wave as well as the contributions of more politically radical
feminists and of women activists and theorists marginalized within each
wave.21
I share Mann’s thoughts on such necessary problematisation. I conceive fem-

inist thought as historically and geographically situated. Therefore, more nuanced
concepts and more detailed research with regard to individual and small-scale
actions, uncommon or marginal themes, and competing positions are not only
welcome, but a necessity.
This text is dedicated to the study of The International Dinner Party in Femi-
nist Curatorial Thought. The International Dinner Party project was originally conceived
by Suzanne Lacy as a tribute to her mentor Judy Chicago. The Dinner Party by Judy
Chicago opened on March 14, 1979. During the exhibition opening at the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the International Dinner Party was performed by
Lacy. The Dinner Party is considered a powerful and controversial icon of feminist
art and by extension a symbol of second-wave feminism. The International Dinner
Party both shares, and as I seek to show, transgresses the legacy constructed by the
historiographic operations at work in the wave model. Therefore, it is of impor-
tance to understand how the wave model operates. This offers the basis for work-
ing out how The International Dinner Party is conventionally situated in historical
terms. The International Dinner Party is constituted via complex relations within a
network of many different individual feminist activists and artists, but also feminist
groups and organizations. Therefore, both actions representing different scales,
ranging from the individual to organizations, are of interest to this study. In addi-
tion, the individuals and organizations contributing to The International Dinner Party
are situated in regional and geographical contexts differing widely from each other.
This confirms that all the critical points raised in Susan Archer Mann’s problemati-
sation need to be taken up in research and theorisation. Yet, I want to argue that a
“cultural feminist analysis”22 of The International Dinner Party and its situating in
trans-historic feminist curatorial thought also needs to critically challenge the foun-
dational assumptions of the waves narrative. The waves model suggests develop-
ment and progress. It is this progress-centric model of historiographic narration
that feminist thought sought to reject and deconstruct. Therefore, it is important
to understand the waves narrative in historical terms, yet to not reproduce its
chronopolitical hegemony. Prefeminist or protofeminist, feminist, and postfeminist
suggest a similar progress-centric and linear conception of historic development.
Feminism has come to be understood through this specific, chronopolitically
charged terminology and ordering. Not only does such an ordering construct a
linearity, it also suggests that one model replaces the other, or put differently,
makes it obsolete. The differences between pre- and post- or between different
waves are therefore not only temporal, but ideological. They are commonly under-
stood as ideologically split, especially between second wave and third wave femi-
nism or feminism and postfeminism. Meskimmon’s critical cartography is helpful to
recognize that chronology and ideology are complexly connected with geographies
and geopolitics. Such a linear ordering implies the “displacement of one set of
approaches by others.”23 This means first of all that the waves model was applied
outside of the U.S. context from where it originated. It means secondly that this
displacement has to be critically analysed with regard to what is referred to as
centres and margins. Revisiting March 14, 1979, the evening of The International
Dinner Party, a moment in time commonly fully associated with second-wave femi-

nist thinking, will necessarily entail confronting inherent hegemonic assumptions

and working out nuanced differences of historic feminist thought and movement. I
aim to critically address the chronopolitical implications and to actively address the
paradox that feminist historiography has critically deconstructed meta-narratives,
progress, and linearity, yet the historical study of feminism has, to some degree,
reproduced such concepts. I will take up Mann’s points of paying attention to
individual and small-scale collective actions as well as to uncommon actions in
order to better understand the diversity of feminisms articulated via the messages
of The International Dinner Party. I engage with “situated knowledges and politics of
location”24 throughout my analysis. Therefore I will link the points raised by Mann
with Meskimmon’s concept of critical cartography in order to counteract both a
progress-centric wave-based model and a centre (U.S.)-to-margin-based chrono-
logical model.
Questions and Paradoxes

Let me now turn once more to asking a question. I have already pointed out
that asking what feminism is, or what feminist art is, or what feminist thought is,
can actually be considered a paradigmatic feminist method. I cannot emphasize
strongly enough the importance of the question as method. First, to keep the
question open as a method implies to theoretically bear the consequences that it
can in fact not be answered. Or put differently, that it is part of the question’s
method to resist closure and to uphold this ongoing process of producing new
answers. Second, it is not only necessary to reopen the question again and again
from a critical and deconstructivist theoretical perspective, as noted before, but
also because of the transformations of the concrete historical conditions that need
to be addressed. Looked at through the lens of the question as method, feminism is
based upon this paradox of never fully answering and, at the same time, never
ceasing to ask over and over again. In particular, I will now focus the histories of art
histories and their pivoting on the question as method and the paradox as constitu-
tive. In so doing, I aim to transfer insights gained from art histories’ critical historio-
graphic project to my analysis of The International Dinner Party with regard to curat-
ing’s historiography. In her essay, The Politics of Theory: Generations and Geographies in
Feminist Theory and the Histories of Art Histories, Griselda Pollock activates the tradi-
tion of the question as feminist method.
The term ‘feminist theory’ has a wide currency now. But what is it? Does it
mean that there is a coherent perspective on all areas unified under the
rubric feminism? […] Raising the question catapults us from the neatly
ordered universe/university of intellectual knowledge with this clear discipli-
nary division into a field of practice. The feminist question—the key question
of feminism—brings down the load bearing walls which compartmentalize
academic knowledge to reveal the structure of sexual difference by which
society and culture is riven, showing that all disciplines are impregnated with
the ideological premises of a sex/gender system.25
Following Pollock and many other feminist scholars and theorists, an impor-
tant aim for feminist thought is therefore to transform compartmentalized intellec-
tual knowledge production into a field of practice. Feminist knowledge practices
pivot around the social and ideological implications of sexual difference. Turning
knowledge production into a field of practice is important for my understanding of
curating’s underpinnings. A feminist turn in curating also addresses the social and
ideological implications of sexual difference. For this reason, curatorial knowledge
production can be understood as a practice, and, as I want to suggest, curatorial
knowledge production as a feminist practice. I will return to this in more detail later

in this essay. For now, I want to emphasize that, from a feminist standpoint, practic-
ing knowledge includes the activities of dis/ordering, un/learning, inter/vening, and
moving inter/disciplinarily. This is in line with opening the question of what femi-
nism is and what feminism does. Feminist knowledge production also needs to
extend such a practice of dis/ordering and inter/vening to the body of knowledge
produced by feminist thought. Yet, in doing so, feminist thought ought to be care-
ful not to repeat the ideological splitting and displacing of one set of approaches by
others based upon a progress-centric chronopolitical argument of before/after,
obsolete/new, earlier/future-oriented. “Feminism demands that certain issues
remain in view, and it functions as a resistance to any tendency to stabilize knowl-
edge or theory around fictions of the generically human or the monolithically uni-
versal or any other androcentric, racist, sexist or ageist myth of imperial West-
26
ern culture and its (often not so) radical discourses.” Such a movement of
destabilizing needs to be practised not only with regard to the monolithic regimes
to which Pollock critically points, but also with regard to by now hegemonic and
canonical chronopolitical regimes within feminism itself.
Then, I would assert that feminism signifies a set of positions, not an essence;
a critical practice not a doxa; a dynamic and self-critical response and inter-
vention, not a platform. It is the precarious product of a paradox. Seeming to
speak in the name of women, feminist analysis perpetually deconstructs the
very term around which it is politically organised. (…) Yet there has been no
linear progress from early thoughts to mature theories. Rather we have a
synchronic configuration of debates within feminism, all of which have some-
thing valuable to contribute to the enlarging feminist enterprise. Yet they are
all, none the less, caught up in the very systems of sexual difference they
critique. The issue becomes one of how to make that paradox the condition
of radical practice.27
Both, synchronic configuration and the paradox as a condition of radical

practice are of methodological importance for my study of Suzanne Lacy’s Interna-
tional Dinner Party in Feminist Curatorial Thought. Even though I am committed, as I
pointed out earlier, to critical cartography and politics of location, I am equally
interested in mobilizing synchronic configurations, both over times and in time. In
bringing together cultural feminist analysis, archival studies, feminist art history,
critical feminist theories, philosophy, curatorial research and curatorial practices, I
seek to counteract the academic compartmentalization in order to destabilize
intellectual knowledge as field of practice. This process brings together feminist
cultural analysis and curating in order to create new insights into feminist artmak-
ing and into emerging feminist histories of curating’s histories by being attentive to
The International Dinner Party’s contributors’ situated knowledge and by associating
affinities and links within a historiography of feminist curating.
Following Pollock, I refuse a linear succession from earlier feminist practice

and theory to a mature feminist practice and theory. This follows a line of feminist
thought that is aimed against monolithic and universal(izing) structures of hegem-
onic Western thought and culture. I join Pollock’s critical analysis of the histories of
art history, which offers a model for critically analysing histories of curating’s his-
tory, with Sarah Bracke’s and María Puig de la Bellacasa’s re-working of feminist
standpoint theory. In historical terms, standpoint theory came into being during
the same decade The International Dinner Party took place. An important example
for standpoint theory from this period is Dorothy E. Smith’s 1974 Women’s Perspec-
tive as a Radical Critique of Sociology. Both the feminist activist art practice of The
International Dinner Party and standpoint theory share the active questioning of

power relations and seek to take the production of knowledge into women’s own
hands in order to turn it into a political practice. Activist feminist art practice and
feminist research practice converge in the strategy (if not the practice) of con-
sciousness-raising to “produce oppositional and shared consciousnesses in
oppressed groups—to create oppressed peoples as collective ‘subjects’ of research
rather than only as objects of others’ observation (…).”28 Both The International
Dinner Party and standpoint theory share the historical horizon of second-wave
feminism. Again, it is of importance to critically point to the chronopolitical regime
at work. “The main critique on standpoint we are confronted with is, roughly
stated: standpoint feminism is modern and essentialist and left little space to other
parameters of analysis, such as “race,” ethnicity, class, and sexuality, facilitated by
postmodernisms.”29 For my pursuit of an anti-monolithic project within feminist
thought and a politics that actively seeks to re/disorient canonical orderings of fem-
inist thought as a passage from earlier essentialist and collectivity-oriented to anti-
essentialist and individualist-based approaches, joining Pollock’s arguments with
Bracke’s and de la Bellacasa’s work is crucial. Speaking of the paradox, Pollock
argues that it shaped the period of feminist thought from the late 1970s to the late
1990s.
This paradox has shaped the history of the last twenty years of feminist
practice, which can perhaps be characterized by the passage from essence (a
strong sense of identity of woman and the collectivity of women) to differ-
ence (a more anguished recognition not only of that which divides and
undoes the collectivity of women, but also the structural condition of the
term ‘Woman’ as an affect of psycho-symbolic systems which produce and
differentiate subjectivities across the formations of class, race, and sexual-
ity).30
In my attempt to follow not only the logic, but also the history of the para-
dox, I reach an impasse. The paradox’s history shares the chronopolitical regime of
the ideological split governing the progress-centric narration of the wave model.
This is marked by a constellation of earlier/later and, as described by Pollock here,
by essence/difference. Critical cartography cannot solve this problem of using the
paradox as a condition for critical practice, yet avoiding a linear chronology. There-
fore, I turn to Sarah Bracke’s and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s “genderational“ dis-
cussion of standpoint theory. They express their hope that standpoint theory’s
“constant reformulation (…) through feminist practices of theory (…) perpetually
challenges theoretical dichotomies, in particular modern/postmodern opposi-
tions.”31 Their work presents a possibility to proactively work with the oppositions
that are inherent to the chronopolitical regimes of progress and displacement
within feminist thought. “As academics we have been raised as ‘modernists’
because we are supposed to show that we know better than those who came before
us. As feminist academics, we feel we ought to resist this modernist attitude because
we are aware that we do not know ‘better than’ but ‘better with/because of’ those
who came before us.”32
With Pollock I showed that feminist thought turns intellectual knowledge

production into a field of practice that allows for synchronic configurations. Follow-
ing Meskimmon, I showed how critical cartography makes chronopolitical regimes
of progress understood within feminist thought. Therefore, special attention [now]
needs to be paid to the politics of location emphasized by Lykke. Following Bracke
and Puig de la Bellacasa, I seek to show how orientations via dichotomies, which
play out both with regard to chronopolitics and to the politics of location, can be
politically addressed within a field of practice. Bracke and Puig de la Bellacasa intro-

duce a line of thought that suggests “better with/because of” rather than “better
than.”33 This opens up the potential of a very different chronopolitical orientation
towards the past. It does by no means obviate the need for a critical revisiting of
the past nor the necessary deconstruction of monolithically universal and Western-
centric historiographic knowledge production, but it avoids the ideological split of
before/after or obsolete/current that functions as an impasse in much of feminist
thought’s history. ‘Better with/because of’ opens up an envisioning of different
cross-temporal and transgressive affinities, or to put it differently, synchronic align-
ments. It also creates the possibility of envisioning how opening the traditional
question of what feminism is and what feminist practice does allows it to no longer
be governed by the chronopolitical imperative of “better than,” but by a continuous
dialogue and debate based upon “better with.”34
Binaries/Dichotomies
I have demonstrated that feminist thought actively engages with binaries and
dichotomies. These are not only part of feminist thought’s legacy but also part of
ongoing debates and discussions. Binaries and dichotomies are part of the paradox
that constitutes feminist thought as a form of knowledge production considered a
field of practice and a field of practicing theory politically. Binaries and dichotomies
are equally part of the chronopolitical ordering of feminist thought’s canonical
historiography. Before/after is conventionally equated with an ideological split and
a move toward progress. Before/after is constitutive for the displacement narrative.
Even though the displacement narrative supposedly overcomes binary structures
central to Western thought, it is, paradoxically, itself governed by yet another
binary: the before/after binary. This closely resembles a progress-based model of
advancement. Binaries express power relations and hierarchies.
Examples include the division of sexes into male/female or of sexualities into

heterosexual/homosexual. While these categories are used to define and dis-
tinguish one from the other, they are not just different; they are unequal;
they entail hidden hierarchies where one side is privileged and the other is
viewed as abject or lesser. There is also a sinister tendency to link up the
lesser side of the binary with other demeaning or demonizing terms. For
example, male/female is often linked to rational/irrational, culture/nature,
order/chaos, and so forth.35
Binaries, and dichotomies, are part of the politics of location. ‘Here’, equated
with U.S. or Western feminist thought, is understood as a location of origin, a
chronopolitically charged “before”. “There”, equated with non-Western feminist
thought, then becomes “after”. Here/there is equated with centre/margin or cen-
tre/periphery. Here/there has commonly been understood as unequal. Bound up
with the chronopolitical regime, this here/there model has been conventionally
turned into a U.S.-centric or Western-centric hegemony of feminist thought which
then spread to other parts of the world. This model can therefore be expressed in a
binary that is spatially and temporally constructed as follows: here-before/there-
after. This reveals that U.S. or Western feminist thought has not operated outside
the hegemonic chronopolitical regimes governing modernity’s relations between
Western and non-Western societies with regard to temporal value judgements
such as advanced or developing.36 Even though feminist thought actively challenged
modernism and modernity, it is therefore paradoxically bound up with the power
politics of its binary thought structure on many levels. It is not only important to
challenge the binary between Western and non-Western, but equally the construc-
tion of a monolithic West and a monolithic non-West. Displacement narratives
therefore not only concern the temporalities structuring feminist thought’s histori-

ographies, but spatialities expressed through specific locations as well. To compli-

cate matters further, the wave model has to be joined with the before/after model
in order to critically examine the chronopolitically charged hierarchical logics and
power relations. At times, “before” is equated with first-wave feminism, which is
rediscovered and praised for its engagement with civil and political rights. At times,
“before” is equated with second-wave feminism, which is dismissed on grounds of
essentialism and lack of attention paid to race-based, class-based, ethnic, religious,
or immigrant diversity. At times, “before” is equated with first-wave feminism and
dismissed on grounds of privileging the right to vote over economic or social rights.
At times, “before” is equated with second-wave feminism and rediscovered in its
dimensions of social reproduction, standpoint, and eco-feminism. Some feminists
argue for a twenty-first century fourth-wave feminism.37 At times, “before” is
equated with third-wave feminism, which is criticised for its failure to establish a
coherent feminist movement. At times, “before” is equated with third-wave femi-
nism, which is rediscovered for its deconstruction of binaries. “The post-structural-
ist generation should be given credit for loosening up the binary scheme of dialecti-
cal thought and confronting the issue of negativity and power in a more
multi-directional, embodied and embedded manner.“38 Fourth-wave feminism is,
yet again, the dis/continuation of the wave model. The previous waves are over-
come, yet the waves model itself is continued. Postcolonial debate, critical positions
by women of colour feminists both living in the global South and the global North,
transgenderism, as well as the changes wrought by social media in activism, politics,
and networking, are some of the features considered central to the emergence of
current fourth-wave feminism.
Paradoxically, before/after is the central binary that remains, despite femi-

nist thought’s deconstructing of and loosening up of binary thought. Amelia Jones
has pointed out ways of critical engagement with the binary legacy of much of
Western thought, and by extension, much of Western art. 39 Jones proposes a
“queer feminist durationality.”40 She elaborates: “I suggest that feminism must take
on queer theoretical insights (particularly the dissolution of binary thinking and the
putting in motion of meaning) as well as the insights of Marxian, anti-racist and
postcolonial theory in order to accommodate the new global world order.” And, as
I want to add, with regard to my study of The International Dinner Party, a further
extension to such an approach with regard to the chronopolitical regimes revealed
by Meskimmon’s critical cartography beyond the historic moment of the new
global world order, toward a critical engagement with both the past and the future.
Far from disregarding the impact of binary thought, Jones acknowledges the rever-
berations of its power relations. Therefore, she proposes a (self-)critical feminist
engagement that thinks “beyond or away from the binary,”41 and she does so by
opening up a question which is, as I have shown before, very much part of feminist
thought’s tradition.
How can we think beyond or away from the binary, or more explicitly put,
how can we understand images and performances in more nuanced ways as
articulating potential identificatory structures that are not simplistically
binary? How can we explore these flows of inter-relationality through visual
practice in ways that still convey a feminist politics—an attention to inequities
among subjects relating to gender broadly construed as experienced and
understood through class, national, ethnic, religious, and other modes of
identification?42
Amelia Jones carefully opens up possible associations and alignments

between the more recent emergence of a queer feminist durationality and the

longstanding tradition of feminist politics. She cautions that there is the risk of
binary simplicity, and therefore emphasizes the need for critical deconstruction.
Yet, she equally cautions to dismiss identification entirely, and in extension identity
politics. For that reason, Jones suggests to work critically with both the dangers
and potentials of identificatory structures. Looked at through the lens of chronop-
olitical regimes, Jones carefully navigates different waves of feminist temporalities
and proposes new alignments via the temporal category of durationality. She sug-
gests ways of critical engagement activated by ‘away and beyond’ as well as new
alignments activated by ‘inter, trans, and between.’ This is of methodological
importance for my research and my cultural feminist analysis of the issues raised by
The International Dinner Party.
The binary before/after is very much part of movements of displacement

and advancement/development and their respective value judgments. Before/after
governs much of feminist thought’s historiography and is actively challenged by
concepts such as queer feminist durationality and better with/because of. In her
book Why Stories Matter. The Political Grammar of Feminist Thought, Clare Hemmings
offers a precise analysis of how narratives about Western feminist theory are con-
structed. Hemmings addresses the politics at work with regard to recurrent tropes
that can be found in the historiographic narratives of academic Anglo-European
feminist theory. She differentiates between three different modes of storytelling in
the narratives that are to be discerned in essays published in feminist journals such
as Signs, Feminist Review, and Feminist Theory. These three modes are progress (p.
31-58), loss (p. 59-94) and return (p. 95-130). Progress aims to leave behind essen-
tialism. Loss laments the absence of a current feminist movement. Return suggests
that, “We can combine the lessons of postmodern feminism with the materiality of
embodiment and structural inequalities to move on from the current and theoreti-
cal impasse.”43 Taken together, progress, loss, and return offer a model to under-
stand how the before/after dichotomy is activated and re-negotiated. Hemmings’
analysis is of importance in working out chronopolitical pitfalls and in understand-
ing better just how chronopolitically charged any historiography of feminist
thought is. In historical terms, The International Dinner Party is part of the concrete
conditions of the year 1979 and can thus be considered part of second-wave femi-
nism. Such a historiographic ordering bears the danger of the project being dis-
missed on grounds of essentialism. (= progress) This could also lead to its romanti-
cization or glorification because of the project’s representation of a celebratory
moment of a worldwide feminist movement. (= loss) It could also lead to using the
lessons gained from the project in contemporary feminist artistic and curatorial
practice. (= return). In order to counteract these chronopolitical dangers and to
actively address its paradoxes, I will use a research-based approach to the contribu-
tors to The International Dinner Party. This approach relies, as I explained earlier, on
the politics of location and situated knowledge in order to counteract a hegemonic
chrono-cartography of here-before (U.S. or Western feminism) and there-after
(non-U.S. or non-Western feminism). Special attention will be paid to demonstrat-
ing how The International Dinner Party foregrounds concerns that resist categoriza-
tion via the wave model, and therefore allow for a more nuanced understanding of
feminist thought by way of avoiding simplifying dichotomic constellations between
before/after and here/there. My research-based approach toward the feminist
subjects who contributed to the making of The International Dinner Party seeks to
counter-act the here-before/there-after binary. Central to my feminist cultural
analysis of the issues raised by The International Dinner Party is a theoretical align-
ment between queer feminist durationality and ‘better with/because of.’
Associations and Transgressions

So far, I have firmly placed my approach to method in a tradition of feminist

thought, and have tried to use it to approach curating in a theoretical and historical
framework. Equally, I have opened a critical perspective on feminist thought’s his-
toriographic project with regard to the chronopolitical regime by which it is gov-
erned. I am activating the anti-monolithic intent expressed in feminist thought. Yet,
I am actively counteracting the structural binary of advancement and obsolescence
that is part of feminist thought’s conventional historiographic narratives. Counter-
acting this chronopolitical binary of advancement/obsolescence is a task to be
more fully theoretically acknowledged and addressed within the feminist historio-
graphic enterprise. I bring this counteracting to the project of curating’s historiog-
raphy. And I invoke again the method of the question. Feminism is the question, I
suggested. By association, I want to suggest, curating is the question. In her 2001
essay Survey for Art and Feminism, Peggy Phelan returns to the question of feminism
within the context of a book that is curatorially organized across several genera-
tions of artists.
The troublesome question emerges: what is feminism? When faced with

such an amorphous and ambivalent term, the shrewd often answer that it
must be plural—not feminism but feminisms. […] The ideological stakes in the
question ‘what is feminism?’ have often led to increasingly sophisticated but,
it must be admitted also, increasingly evasive responses. I prefer a bold, if
broad definition: feminism is the conviction that gender has been, and con-
tinues to be, a fundamental category for the organization of culture. Moreo-
ver, the pattern of that organization usually favours men over women.44
Opening the question again is not only a feminist tradition and a theoretical
operation. It is equally a historiographic operation that pays close attention to the
transformationality of theories and practices bound up with the concrete historic
conditions of any given time in any given location. Therefore critical cartography,
situated knowledge, and politics of location are of theoretical importance to my
feminist cultural analysis. Through Griselda Pollock, I introduced the paradox of
being bound up with the very system of sexual difference one critiques and how to
make this paradox the very condition of radical practice. I would now like to pro-
ceed by way of joining questions and paradoxes and binaries/dichotomies with
associations and transgressions. In the already quoted essay, Survey, Peggy Phelan
also writes: “Alluringly open, deceptively simple, art and feminism is a seductive
subject. Among the most provocative words for critical writing, the conjunction
and compels an associative logic.”45 I fully agree with the potentials of an associative
logic and want to foreground that this very logic is open to questions, paradoxes,
and renegotiations of binaries and dichotomies. And/and multiplies this associative
logic and directs its interest to the space that is opened up by the mark of the for-
ward slash that, theoretically speaking, can make itself part of the questions and
paradoxes. Therefore, the forward slash, or whack,46 is of methodological impor-
tance to my approach in order to understand how feminist thought works and
moves. I aim to work conceptually as well as methodologically with the forward
slash or whack, “/”. This becomes a tool of thinking in order to activate this line, this
border, or ultimately this space that both separates and connects. Taken together,
the conjunction and as well as the forward slash motivate transnational as well as
transhistorical associations. Based upon association and transgression, I turn to the
theoretical and practical concept of transnational feminism as developed by Charda
Talpade Mohanty. Suzanne Lacy’s The International Dinner Party project motivated
the contributions of more than 2000 women organizing 200 dinners. Taken
together, the 200 different dinners can be understood as an ad-hoc community
originating through the support system of the 1979 women’s movements. Local

women’s organizations, individual artists, or feminist communities organized din-

ners. Therefore, the framework of transnational feminism is of importance to
understand both the possible associations between women around the globe and
the complexities and contradictions with regard to the politics of location and
situated knowledge as discussed earlier. Mohanty uses these terms “imagined com-
munities” and “communities of resistance” not because they are not “real” but
because it suggests commitment and potential alliances and collaborations across
divisive boundaries.47 Understood as such, community is not an essentializing given
or a ready-made localizable entity. I associate The International Dinner Party with the
concepts of both an imagined community and a community of resistance. In histor-
ical hindsight, this community can be joined by accessing their messages, by tracing
the cultural and political legacy of change produced by this community of women,
and the ad-hoc March 14, 1979 feminist archive they created. I use Mohanty’s
concept of imagined communities and communities of resistance to counteract
notions of essentializing women’s communities, which is very much part of how
second-wave feminism has been historicized and criticized. This is conceptually part
of my reading conventional feminist thought’s historiography against its grain.
The idea of imagined community is useful because it leads us away from

essentialist notions of Third World feminist struggles, suggesting political
rather than biological or cultural bases for alliance. It is not color or sex that
constructs the ground for these struggles. Rather, it is the way we think
about race, class, and gender–the political links we choose to make among
and between struggles. Thus, potentially, women of all colors (including
white women) can align themselves with and participate in these imagined
communities. However, clearly our relations to and centrality in particular
struggles depend on our different, often conflictual, locations and histo-
ries.48
My research-based approach to a selected number of the different commu-

nities or individuals who hosted the 200 different dinners is owed to understanding
their different locations and histories. Yet, I also seek to pay close attention to
possible affinities based upon the politics of association. Therefore, association is
understood both as a theoretical method and a political practice. The first follows
Phelan’s suggestion of an associative logic creating new, unexpected, and, at times,
surprising constellations (something closely resembling curatorial constellations).
The second understands associations politically and follows Mohanty: “Communi-
ties of resistance like imagined communities is a political definition, not an essen-
tialist one.”49 Associating is thus understood as the political practice of producing
and reproducing communities. “Community, then, is the product of work, of strug-
gle.”50
Peggy Phelan’s suggestion of an associative logic led me to place The Inter-
national Dinner Party in feminist curatorial thought. Amelia Jones’ 1996 exhibition
Sexual Politics. Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History inspired the choice of
my title Suzanne Lacy’s International Dinner Party in Feminist Curatorial Thought. In her
exhibition catalogue essay, “Sexual Politics: Feminist Strategies, Feminist Conflicts,
Feminist Histories,” Amelia Jones emphasizes that she aims to “work within a his-
torical and theoretical (rather than aesthetic or monographic) framework.”51 Both
Jones’ curatorial work and her essay writing use a historical and theoretical frame-
work. This strongly inspired my approach toward The International Dinner Party. By
way of using a historical and theoretical framework, I placed The International Dinner
Party in its multi-locational historical context and in feminist curatorial thought,
both historically and currently. Central to my interest are the project’s social poli-
tics, or put differently, the politics of communities of resistance or imagined com-

munities. Equally central to my interest is the project’s complex constellation

between activism, art-making, feminism, political struggles, curating, and the insti-
tution of the museum. I came to understand the different tasks performed by artist
Suzanne Lacy as curatorial in nature. Lacy acted as artist, inviter, feminist commu-
nity organizer, and bridge between the art world and women’s/feminist communi-
ties, between women’s and feminists’ intellectual, convivial, social, and political
work and the institution of the museum. Therefore, not only the critical transgres-
sion of the waves model is of importance to my analysis, but also curatorial and
theoretical transgressions of hegemonic narratives of the history of curating. This
history, for the better part, has been written from the perspective of curators-as-
authors. This, in fact, revives the monographic model of historical narration. Inter-
estingly enough, the art historical convention of the monographic model very
much suits the neoliberal model of star curators.
(…) [T]he shift from the mechanically chronological display to the thematic
or monographic exhibition all dramatise the role of the curator in the media-
tion of art. The visibility of figures like Harald Szeemann or, more recently,
Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Nicolas Bourriaud as the authors of signature exhibi-
tion practices is another effect of the evolution of the neoliberal museum
and its search for constant innovation and dynamism, and is a development
that has produced a voluminous literature on the curator.52
Again, it is the chronopolitical regime of progress and advancement, this

time in the guise of originality, innovation, dynamism, or “novelty,”53 that governs
much of curating’s historiography. Dimitrakaki and Perry propose to “move beyond
the normative distinction between a mothers’ and a daughters’ generation (…).”54
Based upon this suggestion, it is my aim to make a critical contribution to counter-
acting the chronopolitical regime of advancement/obsolescence within feminist
historiography’s waves model and the art historical monographic/neoliberal star-
curator model dominating much of curating’s historiography. “There is in fact a
long and continuous history of feminist curating that has tended to be submerged
by the weight of the search for novelty.”55 I want to turn once more to Sarah
Bracke’s and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s ‘better with/because of’ to support my
resistance against novelty. Novelty also tends to obscure that we build on the work
of others in order to both associate (with) and transgress (beyond). I draw on Doro-
thee Richter’s critical analysis of the curator’s structural position with regard to
modernism’s artistic genius and neoliberalism’s curatorial networker in order to
understand curating from a feminist standpoint.
The figure of the curator (as a structural model) is in many ways a draft of a
new post-Fordist accented authorship. This figure takes on in many ways, as I
have expressed elsewhere, the paradigmatic attributes of the masculine
mythos of “artistic genius”, connects this with mobility and networking
– and there you have the new role model for the Western post-industrial
lifestyle.56
The structural model is, per Richter, embedded in a historiographic con-

struction of genealogical filiation. The neoliberal dynamism and novelty is joined
with the monographic narrative model that is multiplied via a father-son genealogy.
Therefore, critical feminist historiography is key in terms of counteracting the
discursive power relations of such constructions.
Just think of current publications, such as Hans Ulrich Obrist’s (H.U.O.)

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating. It may be symptomatic

that there is only one contribution by a woman in it, with the exception of a
one-page foreword by April Lamm, in which the figure of the curator is
identified in the same father-son line of Harald Szeemann – Pontus Hultén
– Alexander Dorner – H.U.O. […] Not only is the absence of women sympto-
matic, but above all, this discourse about curatorial activity returns to the
subject of the “genius curator.”57
I draw on Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock’s Framing Feminism. Art and
the Women’s Movement 1970-1985 to understand that much of feminist art making
also led to exhibition organizing, exhibition making, and was in fact marked by
collective curatorial energy and endeavour. I draw on exemplary curatorial models
such as Sexual Politics. Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History by Amelia
Jones to understand how feminist art history and theory impacts on curating and
via curating. Another feminist way of approaching curatorial practice is offered by
curator and critic Renée Baert’s “who thinks through curating as a dialogical prac-
tice: exhibitions talking to other exhibitions.”58 ‘Because of’ all of this feminist
thought on which to build, I can move toward a different understanding of curat-
ing’s practice and curatorial historiography. I seek to build upon feminist associa-
tions and transgressions with regard to curatorial thought. My critical refusal of
the displacement narratives and the novelty imperative leads me to using an associ-
ative logic and a transgressive feminist imagination of linking The International Din-
ner Party with a possible extension toward curating’s history, embodied in the salon
model, and toward curating’s future via feminist and queer feminist living archive
practices and imagined communities of resistance.
In concluding, I want to return to my opening question: What if there is a

feminist turn in curating? And I want to suggest that there is in fact a feminist turn
in curating. I understand my feminist cultural analysis of The International Dinner
Party that pairs a research-based approach with a theory-based approach to be part
of this feminist turn in curating. Methodologically I build on feminist thought to
historicise, theorise, and practise curating. I want to emphasize that it is my aim to
counteract the chronopolitics that would proclaim such a turn as novelty-centric,
and therefore ultimately bound up with the advancement/obsolescence binary. On
the contrary, throughout my study I follow the earlier mentioned feminist method
of ‘better with/because of’ those who came before us.”59 It is my firm conviction
that a feminist turn in curating builds upon questions raised, answers suggested,
and transgressions risked by many, many others. Because of these possible associa-
tions with the work of many others, such a feminist turn in curating will, through-
out my study, be extended both toward the past and toward (possible) futures.
Elke Krasny is professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She was Guest Pro-
fessor at the University of Bremen in 2006, at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg in
2013, and at the Vienna University of Technology in 2014. She received the Austrian Out-
standing Artist Award for Women’s Culture in 2011. In 2012 she was Visiting Scholar at the
CCA, Canadian Centre for Architecture, in Montréal. Her work as a curator, critic, cultural
theorist and urban researcher clearly shows her interest in urban transformation processes,
the critical history of architecture, the politics of history, and the historiography of feminist
curatorial practices. The edited a book on the history of self-organization Hands-On Urban-
ism 1850-2012. The Right to Green appeared in 2012 and her exhibition by the same name
was shown at the Architecture Centre Vienna, the Museum for Contemporary Art Leipzig
and included in the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2012. She curated the discursive event
Women’s Movements: Feminist Agency. Intersections of Activism, Archiving, Art, Art His-
tory, Critical Research and Curating at Rotor, association for contemporary art Graz. She

co-edited the 2013 volume Women’s:Museum. Curatorial Politics in Feminism, Education,

History, and Art. Krasny did take part in the “Research Platform for Curatorial and Cross-
disciplinary Cultural Studies, Practice-Based Doctoral Programme”.
Notes Geometries of Time-Space,” in Global Futures: Migration,

1 A number of exhibitions, conferences, research Environment and Globalization, eds. Avtar Brah, Mary J.
networks, symposia, and publications do suggest that we Hicman, and Máirtín Mac an Ghaill (New York: St. Martin‘s
can in fact speak of a feminist turn in curating. Examples Press, 1999), 31. quoted in Meskimmon (2007), 324.
include the 2006 Curatorial Strategies issue of n.paradoxa: 6 Meskimmon (2007), 324.
international feminist art journal, the 2006 essay Feminist 7 To give but a very few examples: What is Femi-
Curatorial Strategies and Practices since the 1970s, 2007 nism? by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1916; What is Socialist
exhibitions WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution and Global Feminism? by Barbara Ehrenreich, 1976; What is Feminism?
Feminisms. 2008 witnessed La Mirada Iracunda/The Furious edited by Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley, 1986; What is
Gaze and 2009 witnessed Gender Check. Femininity and Feminist Art? Interview with Mary Kelly by Rozsika Parker, 1977;
Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe. Publications include What is Feminist Art? by Judy Chicago (no date); Chris
the 2006 essay Issues in Feminist Curation: Strategies and Beasley, What Is Feminism? An Introduction to Feminist Theory,
Practices, the 2010 volume of Feminisms is Still Our Name: 1999; What is Feminist in Feminist Theory? by Cathrine
Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices, the Egelands, 2004; What is Black Feminism?, The Black Interna-
2013 Politics in a Glass Case. Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and tional, 2014.
Curatorial Transgressions and Women’s:Museum. Curatorial 8 Chris Beasley, What Is Feminism? An Introduction to
Politics in Feminism, Education, History, and Art, and npara- Feminist Theory (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999) 21.
doxa’s A Chronological List of International Exhibitions on Quoted in Susan Archer Mann (2010), 4.
Women Artists and Feminist art Practices (http://www.ktpress. 9 see Susan Archer Mann (2010), xvi.
co.uk/pdf/feministartexhibitions.pdf, last updated 10 Rosemarie Tong, “Introduction. The Diversity of
October 2014). Symposia and conferences include the Feminist Thinking,” in Feminist Thought. A More Comprehen-
1999 Dialogues and Debates Symposium on Feminist Positions in sive Introduction (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2014), 1.
Contemporary Visual Arts hosted by Künstlerinnenstiftung 11 Tong (2014), 1.
Höge, Bremen; the 2008 The Furious Gaze conference at 12 Tong (2014), 1.
Centro Cultural Montehermoso Kulturunea; the 2010 13 There are a number of publications that in fact
Frauen:Museum: Zwischen Sammlungsstrategie und Sozialer suggest a turn toward curating’s history and a number of
Plattform (Women’s:Museum: Between Collection Strategies and different journals establishing a discourse on curating.
Social Platforms) at the Vienna Library, the 2012 Civil Examples include: Nathalie Heinrich and Michael Pollak,
Partnerships? Queer and Feminist Curating conference at Tate “From Museum Curator to Exhibition Auteur: Inventing a
Modern London, the 2012 The First Supper Symposium at Singular Position,” in Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Reesa
Handverkeren Kurs- og Konferansesenter, the 2014 Greenberg, Bruce W Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (London
Curating Feminism Conference hosted by Sydney College of and New York: Routledge, 1996), 23–250; Peter White,
the Arts, School of Letters, Arts and Media, and The Power ed., Naming a Practice: Curatorial Strategies for the Future
Institute, University of Sydney, and Feminist Turn in Curating (Banff: Banff Centre for the Arts, 1996); Barnaby Drabble
panel at the 2015 Curating Everything (curating as symptom) and Dorothee Richter, eds., Curating Degree Zero: An
symposium at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst International Curating Symposium (Nuremberg: Verlag für
Zurich. Moderne Kunst, 1999); Susan Hiller and Sarah Martin, eds.,
2 Susan Archer Mann, “Introduction,” in Doing The Producers, (Newcastle upon Tyne: University of New-
Feminist Theory: From Modernity to Postmodernity (New York: castle upon Tyne, Department of Fine Art, 2000); Karsten
Oxford University Press, 2010), xvii. Schubert, The Curator’s Egg: The Evolution of the Museum
3 Marsha Meskimmon, “Chronology through Concept from the French Revolution to the Present Day (London:
Cartography: Mapping 1970s Feminist Art Globally,” in One Off Press, 2000); Catherine Thomas, The Edge of
WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, ed. Cornelia Butler Everything: Reflections on Curatorial Practice (Banff: Banff
and Lisa Gabrielle Mark (Los Angeles: The Museum of Centre Press, 2000); Gavin Wade, ed., Curating in the 21st
Contemporary Art and Cambridge and London: The MIT Century (Walsall: New Art Gallery Walsall; Wolverhampton:
Press, 2007), 335. University of Wolverhampton, 2000); Hans Ulrich Obrist,
4 Meskimmon (2007), 335. Interviews, ed. Thomas Boutoux, vol. 1 (Milan: Charta,
5 Doreen Massey, “Imagining Globalization: Power- 2003); Christoph Tannert, Ute Tischler, and Künstlerhaus

Bethanien, eds., MIB–Men in Black: Handbook of Curatorial html#.VWq_EUuWHwI.

Practice (Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2004) Revolver, 15 Tong (2014), 1. Recitation is owed to Clare
2004; Hans-Joachim Müller, Harald Szeemann: Exhibition Hemmings who introduced this method in her 2011 book
Maker (Munich: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2006); Paul Why Stories Matter. The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory.
O’Neill, Curating Subjects (London: Open Editions/de 16 Beasley (1999), 21.
Appel, 2007); Hans Ulrich Obrist, Brief History of Curating 17 Mann (2012), xvi.
(Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2008); Hans Ulrich Obrist, Everything 18 Mann (2012), xviii.
You Always Wanted to Know About Curating* But Were Afraid 19 Meskimmon (2007), 335.
to Ask (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2011); 20 Mann (2010), xvii.
Dorothee Richter, “Artists and Curators as Authors, 21 Mann (2010), xvii–xviii.
Competitors, Collaborators, or Teamworkers?“ in Cultures 22 Griselda Pollock, “A Lonely Preface,“ in Old
of the Curatorial, eds. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, Mistresses. Women, Art and Ideology, Rozsika Parker and
and Thomas Weski (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, Griselda Pollock (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013),
2012); Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (New xxiv.
York: Independent Curators International, 2012); Paul 23 Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political
O’Neill, Paul, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Grammar of Feminist Theory (Durham: Duke University Press,
Cultures, (Cambridge, Mass and London: MIT Press, 2012); 2011), 32.
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ways of Curating (London: Faber & 24 Nina Lykke, Feminist Studies. A Guide to Intersectio-
Faber, 2014 Jens Hoffman, (Curating) From A to Z (Zurich: nal Theory, Methodology and Writing (New York and London:
JRP Ringier, 2015) Routledge, 2010), xiii.
Another route into writing curating’s history is 25 Griselda Pollock, “The Politics of Theory:
provided by Afterall’s Exhibition Histories Series. “This Generations and Geographies in Feminist Theory and the
series is the result of a research project developed by Histories of Art Histories,” in Generations and Geographies in
Afterall at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock
University of the Arts London, in collaboration with the (London: Routledge, 1996), 4.
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Van Abbemuseum, 26 Pollock (1996), 4-5.
Eindhoven. The first publication was launched in 2010. In 27 Pollock (1996), 4-5.
2012, a new partnership was formed with the Center for 28 Sandra Harding, “Introduction: Standpoint
Curatorial Studies, Bard College.” (Cornelia Butler and Theory as a Site of Political, Philosophical and Scientific
other authors, From Coneptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Debate,“ in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. Intellectual
Number Shows 1969–74, London: Afterall, Central Saint & Political Controversies, ed. Sandra Harding (New York and
Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London: Routledge, 2004), 3.
London, 2012) flyleaf. 29 Sarah Bracke and María Puig de la Bellacasa,
Journals on curating’s theory and practice, on “Building Standpoints,“ in The Feminist Standpoint Theory
curatorial discourse, and to some extent, curating’s Reader. Intellectual & Political Controversies, ed. Sandra
histories include: Curator The Museum Journal (this peer- Harding (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 309.
reviewed academic journal was founded in 1958); Exhibi- 30 Pollock (1996), 5.
tionist (published by the National Association for Museum 31 Sarah Bracke and María Puig de la Bellacasa,
Exhibition since 1981); Manifesta Journal. Around Curatorial “Building Standpoints,“ in The Feminist Standpoint Theory
Practice, http://www.manifestajournal.org/about (founded Reader. Intellectual & Political Controversies, ed. Sandra
in 2003); OnCurating, http://www.on-curating.org (this Harding (New York and London: Routledge, 2004).
international journal focuses on curatorial practice and 32 Bracke and Puig de la Bellacasa (2004), 309.
theory, it was founded in 2008); The Exhibitionist, http:// 33
the-exhibitionist.com (this journal by curators and for 34 To provide an example here. In Depression. a
curators was founded in 2009); Red Hook Journal, http:// Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich describes the work of artists
www.bard.edu/ccs/redhook/about-the-red-hook-journal/ Sheila Pepe and Allyson Mitchell to emphasize that “their
(the Center for Curatorial Studies Bard started this journal work does not celebrate the ‘third wave‘ at the expense of
in 2011); Journal of Curatorial Studies (this peer-reviewed the second wave.“ (p.188) Cvetkovich states that artist
print journal was started in 2012); Artist as Curator, http:// Sheila “Pepe proactively names as her influences both Judy
www.theartistascurator.org (this publication project was Chicago and Eva Hesse, slyly referring to them as the
started in 2013) parents who didn‘t speak to one another and expressing a
14 Dorothee Richter, “About On-Curating.Org, conviction that work that can be simultaneously sexy and
ONCURATING.org, issue 01 (2008): 1. Accessed May, 24, abstract.“ (p. 182) see: Ann Cvetkovich, “The Utopia of
2015. http://www.on-curating.org/index.php/issue-1. Ordinary Habit. Crafting, Creativity, and Spiritual Practice,“

in Depression: a Public Feeling, (Durham and London: Duke Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1996), 24.
University Press, 2012), 154–202. 52 Dimitrakaki and Perry (2012): 10–11.
35 Susan Archer Mann (2010), 216. 53 Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry, “How to be
36 See: Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest: Seen: An Introduction to Feminist Politics, Exhibition
Discourse and Power“ in Modernity: An Introduction to Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions,” in Politics in a Glass
Modern Societies, ed. Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressi-
and Kenneth Thompson (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell ons, ed. by Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry (Liverpool:
Publishing, 1996), 185–225. Liverpool University Press, 2013), 12.
37 Examples are: Eliasaid Munro, “Feminism: a 54 Dimitrakaki and Perry (2012): 5.
Fourth Wave?” Political Insight 4, 2 (2013) 22–25 or 55 Dimitrakaki and Perry (2012): 12.
Jennifer Baumgardner, “Is there a Fourth Wave? If so, does 56 Dorothee Richter, “In Conversation with False
it matter,“ In F‘EM! Goo Goo, Gaga, and Some Thoughts on Hearted Fanny: Feminist Demands on Curating,” in
Balls. (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2011), 243–252. Women’s: Museum. Curatorial Politics in Feminism, Education,
38 Rosi Braidotti, “Powers of Affirmation,” in The History, and Art, ed. by Elke Krasny and Frauenmuseum
Unexpected Guest: Art, Writing and Thinking on Hospitality, ed. Meran (Wien: Löcker, 2013), 92.
Sally Tallant and Paul Domela (London: Art Books Publi- 57 Richter (2013): 93.
shing, 2012), 281. 58 Malin Hedlin Hayden and Jessic Sjöholm
39 Amelia Jones, “Art as a binary proposition; Skrubbe, “Preface“, in Feminisms is Still Our Name: Seven
identity as a binary proposition,” in Seeing Differently: A Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices, ed. Malin
History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts Hedlin Hayden and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe (Newcastle
(London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 17–62. upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), xviii.
40 Amelia Jones, “Queer Feminist Durationality: 59 Bracke and Puig de la Bellacasa (2004): 309.
Time and Materiality as a Means of Resisting Spatial
Objectification,“ in Seeing Differently A History and Theory of
Identification and the Visual Arts (London and New York:
Routledge, 2012), 170–217.
41 Amelia Jones (2012), 178.
42 Amelia Jones (2012), 178
43 Hemmings (2011), 32.
44 Peggy Phelan, ”Survey,” in Art and Feminism, ed.
Helen Reckitt (London and New York: Phaidon, 2001), 18.
45 Phelan (2001), 16.
46 In writing about an associative logic, I was
delighted to see that the forward slash whack is homo-
phone to “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution“, the
title of the 2007 large-scale feminist exhibition that was
curated by Cornelia Butler and first shown at the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Widely acclaimed for
its scope, the show was also heatedly debated by feminist
art theorists, curators, and historians with regard to the
paradoxes between institutions‘ desires and the willingness
to put on one feminist blockbuster show and institutions‘
resistance to structural, economic, political, and organizati-
onal feminist transformation.
47 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Bor-
ders (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 47.
48 Mohanty (2003), p. 46.
49 Mohanty (2003), p. 47.
50 Mohanty (2003), p. 104.
51 Amelia Jones, “Sexual Politics: Feminist Strate-
gies, Feminist Conflicts, Feminist Histories,“ in Sexual
Politics: Judy Chicago‘s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History, ed.
Amelia Jones (UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of
Art and Cultural Center in association with Berkeley, Los

Performing Justice Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research
Performing Justice – From

Dada’s Trial to Yael Bartana’s
JRMiP Congress
by Avi Feldman
Introduction
The “Trial of Maurice Barrès,” created by Dada in Paris in 1921, represents a
significant moment in avant-garde art. Shifting between the legal and the arts, the
Barrès trial serves as an early example of pioneering experimentation with aesthet-
ics and politics. In the following essay, I seek to not only further explore the trial
from a legal perspective, but to also relate it to our time. In order to so, I have cho-
sen to focus on the first Congress of “The Jewish Renaissance Movement in
Poland” (JRMiP) created by Yael Bartana in 2012. Juxtaposing the Barrès trial and
Bartana’s JRMiP Congress reflects the spirit of thinking of the French Dadaist
André Breton who, in his report following the Barrès trial and the “Grande Saison
Dada,” claimed “that work perceived by its makers to be an experimental failure in
its own time (like the Dada Season of 1921) may nevertheless have resonance in the
future, under new conditions.”1
Yet, the amount of research on the Dada trial as a legal document and event
is relatively scarce,2 which complicates and makes difficult any quest to give an
embedded account of the resonance predicated by Breton. Therefore, in the fol-
lowing essay I aspire to demonstrate how vital it is to unfold the Dada trial in rela-
tion to other notable and influential trials of the era, such as the Alfred Dreyfus and
Émile Zola trials, in order to better comprehend the Dada motivation in staging a
trial and in calling for justice through legal instruments and space. On a similar
note, by paying close attention to the political and social consequences the Dreyfus
trial has had and still holds, I endeavour to analyse Bartana’s Congress and its call
for justice in Europe, Poland, and Israel, to be imagined, if not to be immediately
achieved, by formulating and providing explicit legal demands.
The Barrès Trial – Background

Taking place in May 1921 in Paris, the Trial of Maurice Barrès was held at the
Salle des Sociétés in Paris, revolving around the accountability of Barrès’ metamor-
phosis from being an influential revolutionary thinker to becoming a politician
advocating in favour of nationalism. Announced in several newspapers as a prose-
cution of the writer-turned-politician Maurice Barrès, it assembled members of the
Dada group (directed by poet and writer André Breton) around a court-like perfor-
mance. Made to resemble a French court tribunal, the performance was con-
structed around the participation of Dada members and the public acting as
defence attorneys, prosecution counsel, a judge, two assistant judges, and a presi-
dent of the tribunal.
The trial is perceived by Clair Bishop as part of the second phase of Dada,
which Breton in a Radio interview in 1952 identified as a development of the “lively
agitation” of the first phase, yet now ‘more groping…through radically renewed

means’t phase.”3 According to Bishop, “The Barrès Trial was advertised as a hearing
of the author Maurice Barrès (1862– 1923), whose book Un Homme Libre (1889),
had been a great influence on Breton and Aragon in their youth.” 4 The aim of the
trial was, in Breton’s words, “to determine the extent to which a man could be held
accountable if his will to power led him to champion conformist values that diamet-
rically opposed the ideas of his youth.”5 The charges brought against Barrès during
the trial were summed up in a Dada manner as consisting of “committing an attack
on the security of the mind.”6
Both Bishop and James M. Harding7 begin their exploration of the trial by
positioning this act as part of a European modernist period through which legal
institutional formats were reinvented and re-examined anew. While it may be hard
to pinpoint and agree on when this period began, it is agreed that it “is marked by a
self-conscious exploration of the forms of artistic expression,”8 as evident in Bret-
on’s re-instrumentalization of the courtroom as an artistic intervention. According
to Harding, there is a strong duality to be found in this process as it wanders
between achieving remarkable innovation and yet struggling with “forms that seem
no longer capable of sustaining them.”9 The modernist ambition to find new cul-
tural meanings and a new language to express them has led to re-examination of
existing formats, such as the courtroom and the legal system. “The staging of
Western modernism was frequently tied to a fundamental search for untapped and
fresh venues […] intertwined with a basic rethinking of the very language that con-
stituted the stage.” An earlier known example of this quest, prior to the utilization
of the court and the legal sphere, can be observed in the Dadaists’ reuse of the
format of the cabaret and the creation of Cabaret Voltaire during the years 1915-
1917 in Zurich, which was a “mixed bills of performance, music and poetry.”10 Later
on, in what will come to be known as the “1921 Dada Season,” opening in April of
that year, the Dada group will search for spaces considered by them as having “no
reason to exist […] only areas considered not picturesque, nonhistorical […] and
unsentimental would qualify […]”.11 The season is also a moment in which Dada
began a process of reflection on how it might be reinvented before deteriorating
into a routine.12
Hence, the trial being one of the season’s essential components was part of
Breton’s attempt to conquer new physical and mental terrains for Dada’s actions.
Harding points out that the artistic experimentations characterized by the Dadaist
early revitalizations of theatrical formats through the use of popular cultural ven-
ues, led to a gradual greater interest in the social sphere, such as the courtroom as
further discussed in this chapter. For Harding, this is the result of a constant pendu-
lum movement shared by the Dadaists. The innovation that appeared through “the
ideological guise of a forward-looking, self-reflective, and radical exploration of
new modes of performance […] was almost always haunted by a conservative
shadow.”13 The ambiguity of Dada lies exactly here—between the new and the old,
between the quests for a new set of values while being engaged with already exist-
ing formats.
Dada and the Dreyfus Affair

In order to better comprehend the Dada interest in the format of the trial,
one must begin by referring to one of the most influential and controversial trials
that began in Paris in 1894, only to be resolved in 1906. What has become to be
known as the Dreyfus Affair has had an immense political, legal, and social impact
in France during those years and beyond. The atrocity and the fragility of the
French Republic and its legal system had been brutally exposed following the Drey-
fus trial, up to his exoneration. The debate surrounding the false allegations against

the French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus severely divided public opinion, evoking
issues such as anti-Semitism, nationality, and cultural identity.
The first trial of Dreyfus opened on 19 December 1894, at the end of which
he was found guilty of treason. On 5 January 1895, “At a ceremony in the court-
yard of the École Militaire, Dreyfus was publicly stripped of his rank and was sen-
tenced to life imprisonment in solitary confinement in an ex-lepers’ colony on
Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guyana.”14 Dreyfus was facing public humilia-
tion as he was degraded before an enthusiastic crowd yelling at him “Jew” and
“Judas!”, while he continuously declared his innocence. The public scene of the once
celebrated Army Captain losing his military rank was to become a symbol of a time
of decay. Reminiscent of the long forgotten public tortures of medieval Europe, “It
took place in the immediate shadow of the monument of modernity, the Eiffel
Tower, then six years old […] The very improbability of such an act’s happening at
such a time—to an assimilated Jew who had mastered a meritocratic system and a
city that was the pride and pilothouse of civic rationalism—made it a portent […]
The Dreyfus Affair was the first indication that a new epoch of progress and cos-
mopolitan optimism would be met by a countervailing wave of hatred that
deformed the next half century of European history.”15
The Dreyfus trial, and his imprisonment on what was later to be proved to
be unfounded evidence, has led to several other related court trials and public
turbulence, including a trial against Major Esterhazy as the actual perpetrator of
the act of treason, and another against the writer Émile Zola who published an
open letter in defence of Dreyfus in L’Aurore newspaper under the headline “J’ac-
cuse…!”. Zola needed to consequently flee to England as he was found guilty of
libel. However, his famous open letter to the President of France has prompted
what is known to be the “birth of the intellectuals.” The day after the publication of
“J’accuse” the same newspaper went on to publish a statement in protest of the ‘
judicial irregularities’ of the 1894 trial and ‘the mysteries surrounding the Esterhazy
affair’. This measure became to be known as the “Manifesto of the Intellectuals” as
it “was signed by over a hundred leading figures in the fields of letters, science and
education and marked the entry en masse of ‘the intellectuals’ into politics, in the
sense that they were stepping outside their spheres of expertise and were publicly
and collectively taking a position on a political (and also moral) issue.”16
The Dreyfus trial and his public dishonour attracted great attention from the
general public, however, it was Zola’s trial that led to a concrete and immediate
impact on French society. It seemed that everyone wanted to get involved with the
trial against the famous author as described by Joseph Reinach, the author of His-
toire de l’Affaire Dreyfus: “Never had such a numerous, more passionately agitated,
crowd invaded the Assises chamber. Lawyers were piled on top of each other, some
clinging to the high ramparts surrounding the reserved enclosure or to the window
sills; and mingling with them, crushed to suffocation point, in the emotion of the
spectacle absorbing the whole world’s attention, elegant ladies, journalists, officers,
men of leisure, actors, ‘Everybody who was anybody—all, the cream, of Paris’.”17 The
unprecedented engagement of intellectuals and the general public in the trials that
followed the Dreyfus trial certainly played a pivotal role in changing and reforming
artistic involvement as well. The Dreyfus trial is also known to be the force leading
Léon Blum into active participation in French politics. Blum, who later became the
first socialist and Jewish premier, is quoted by Jacqueline Rose as saying that the
Dreyfus Affair “was as violent a crisis as the French Revolution and the Great
War.”18

Maurice Barrès, the French novelist and journalist-turned-politician who will

be the target of the later-to-come Dada trial, is also considered as one of France’s
leading intellectuals upon whom the Dreyfus trial had an immense influence. In
Jacqueline Rose’s exploration of great writers and scholars such as Marcel Proust,
Samuel Beckett, and Sigmund Freud, she focuses mostly on the Dreyfusards, those
who stood in support of Dreyfus. Rose does not, however, discuss much at length
the position of anti-Dreyfusards, such as Barrès, for whom the Dreyfus trial had
marked a dramatic ideological change in the direction of nationalism.
Yet, I wish to emphasize that it was Dada, more than twenty years following
the Dreyfus Affair, that decided to bring to justice the case of Barrès by accusing
him of moral betrayal for “committing an attack on the security of the mind.”19 The
research on the Dada trial for the most part does not pay attention to the reasons
behind the decision to put Barrès on trial and not any other living or dead or fic-
tional figure. However, I am of the opinion that dwelling on why Barrès became
Dada’s target shall yield fruitful and relevant new perceptions in the context of this
essay. As I will show, this decision by Dada attests to the remarkable influence
Barrès continued to have in France, especially for the younger generation of French
intellectuals, writers, and politicians such as André Gide, Louis Aragon, and Blum
himself. As the historian Zeev Sternhell states in his article on the rise of the right
wing in France following the 1870 war and France’s defeat by Germany: “Barrès was
for the men of his generation the model of the engaged intellectual and the philoso-
phe, in the eighteen-century French meaning of the term.”20 Sternhell further
argues that for most of today scholars, Barrès plays a negligible role, but that in the
context of his own time and means of influence, Barrès must be considered as a
modern intellectual: “His conception of the nature of political struggle in a liberal
democratic system reveals an acute understanding of the imperative of politics in
modern society […] reflected the changes in occurring then in the European intel-
lectual climate which amounted to a veritable intellectual revolution.”21
In what Sternhell perceives to be outstanding political intuition, he demon-

strates how Barrès was able to present nationalism as a fulfilment of socialism, as it
ensures first and foremost the state’s commitment to its citizens as “nationalism,
Barrès claimed, ‘is deeply concerned with establishing just relationships among all
Frenchmen’.”22 This manner in which Barrès impressively juggles to intertwine right
and left politics gained further ideological implications during the trial of Dreyfus.
Allowing a fertile ground for anti-Semitism during the trial, “Barrès went on to
elaborate this nationalism of the ‘little man’, of all those who had nothing but their
rootedness, their Frenchness […] For Barrès, it was a political conception, not mere
hatred of the Jew; it had its task to fulfill on the flanks of socialism. It was a pro-
gressive notion – Barrès was addressing himself to republicans and democrats
meant to serve as the groundwork for a mass movement.”23
The Barrès Trial – A Political Participatory Space

The attempt to capture the masses and to engage in a new participatory
dynamic of politics and debate can, to some degree, be perceived as shared by both
politicians and artists of that time period. In order to further shed light on the
notion of the participatory as a crucial part of the Dada trial, I must again refer to
Bishop and her book, Artificial Hells. According to Bishop, Breton’s interest in the
public sphere led him to consider the format of the trial as a space for Dada experi-
mentation. She states that, “By spring 1921[…] the group decided to take perfor-
mance out of a cabaret context and into extra-institutional public space.”24 Direct-
ing her gaze towards the participatory aspects of Dada, Bishop includes the trial
event as part of the Dada manifestations of April and May 1921, which “sought to

include the Parisian public through ‘Visits – Dada Salon […] Summons – Accusa-
tions Orders and Judgments.”25 Furthermore, the open call to the public to partici-
pate in the trial as part of the jury proves to be, according to Bishop, a step towards
further inclusion of the public in Dada’s performances.
The shift in Dada towards a greater engagement with the public sphere,
institutions, and audiences could also explain why Barrès was chosen as the target
of the trial. In the volatile political atmosphere of the French Third Republic, as
France was healing its wounds from its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, Barrès
adopted a new way to conduct politics. During this “profound crisis in French
democracy,”26 Barrès had also exercised a move into direct contact with the general
public in a call against the establishment, a move to be interrogated by Dada in the
years thereafter: “Against the institution which was the embodiment of parliamen-
tary democracy, Barrès appealed directly to the people; as against the parliamen-
tary circus he called for direct action, and with the ample evocation of revolution-
ary imagery, sought to mobilize against the triumphant bourgeoisie the most
deprived social levels.”27
Barrès, who at first belonged to the liberal left political ranks, is perceived by
historians such as Sternhell to be an intriguing case study for the ideological
changes that began to form in France after 1870, in which the vocabulary of the left
continues to be used by right-wing figures such as Barrès while distorting any sig-
nificance of its prior meaning. “Against parliamentarism, Barrès set the cult of the
leader […] and in place of capitalism, he called for reforms whose essence was pro-
tectionism.”28 Sternhell concludes with the realization that “…in a given situation,
the masses could easily give their support to a party which had borrowed its social
values from the left and its political ones from the right.”29 In other words, or bet-
ter so in the words of Dada: the political and legal establishment has proven to be
“committing an attack on the security of the mind.” This manipulative transforma-
tion from left-wing values to right-wing politics, as in the case of Barrès, was the
essence of the Dada trial.
The Dada trial was set to confront the loss of values and the corruption of
state institutions by deconstructing the courtroom. Breton’s motivation was to
challenge, prosecute, and seek justice from a person once considered by him and
the rest of Dada as a beloved hero and respected ally. In order to be able to judge
and bring about justice, a fully fledged court was what Breton needed. Hence,
unlike earlier events by the Dada group, the trial was straightforwardly conceived
to replicate a real tribunal.30 From its own very title to the red, white, and black
clothes worn by Dada participants in accordance with the official French Court of
Justice, it abandoned much of the Dadaists’ absurdist performances as they headed
into the public sphere. It is agreed upon by most researchers that the trial redi-
rected the Dada movement into new directions and mainly towards Surrealism.
Moreover, the turn of Dada toward a construction of a courtroom signals “the
most significant shift […] Dada now presumed to judge rather than simply to
negate; in other words, it attempted to find a position rather than offering an a
priori rejection of all positions.”31
The transference of Dada from rejection to a judgement claiming to bring

justice where state institutions and courts have failed can be understood as part of
a radical intent to “dissolve the division between the life of art and the art of life.”32
If, at the beginning of the Dada group, it was important to appropriate existing
spaces and transform them into spaces immersed with Dada content and values, it
was now the time to move further into other directions and make use of the public

space, and engage in a new relation with the general public. Using the “real life”
format of the trial into which Dadaist content is inserted demonstrates the ability
of Dada to swing between art and life, and thus produce their own politics. As T.J.
Demos puts it, following Ranciere’s idea of the political, Dada “realizes its ‘moral
directions’ by both transgressing and perpetuating the division between aesthetic
autonomy and social practice.”33
Therefore, what is important to remember when analyzing the Dada trial is

the constant ambivalent tension between being a parody of the law, while at the
same time handling it wholeheartedly in earnest. The trial offers us a break from
the common distinction between life and art. Dada appropriates the format of the
trial for the creation of an intervention in the public space that breaks down the
barriers “…between artistic performance and social process, resulting in a new kind
of assertion of art’s autonomy—not as a self-contained ideal realm of aesthetic
experience, but rather as an autonomous form of social experience.”34 The trial
serves as an excellent example of Dada’s ability to interact with the tension
between life and art. By trying a living politician, the Dada trial managed to blur all
distinctions between the real and the imaginary.
The Barrès Trial – Legal Form and Content

On this backdrop, the Barrès trial can be perceived as a pivotal moment in
which the contradictive mechanism of Dada comes out: “Appropriating as it did the
legal structures of the courtroom is a gesture aimed at securing political and cul-
tural values from a perceived corruption and demise […] it served as the point of
departure for the fleeting infatuation with legal constructs that swept the Parisian
avant-gardes in the early 1920s.”35 Moreover, staging a performance within the
framework of a trial offered a fake legitimacy “whose chief governing assumptions
included the notions of unbiased authority and objective truth.”36 Along with the
Dada fascination with legal matters, the trial stands out as even more vital when
considering the failure of Breton in assembling the “The Congress of Paris” later on,
or in light of several lawsuits that were part of the growing rivalry between Breton
and Tristan Tzara. “The Trial and Sentencing of Maurice Barrès by Dada marked the
beginning of a circuitous chain of events,”37 all of which exposed the contradicting
rhetoric of Dada, as well as their interest in breaking into new formats of artistic
interventions in public space.
Without going any further into the stormy commotion of relations between
Breton and Tzara,38 two main figures of the Dada group, it is generally agreed that
the trial was “a breaking point between Paris Dada and an emerging Surrealist
movement.”39 However, what is central to my argument is a reflection on the trial
as a format that captures within it diverting artistic and legal rhetoric and strate-
gies. These strategies are best summed up by Harding as a motion consisting of
“looking backward and forward simultaneously […] openly committed to a back-
ward-glancing project of recovery and preservation, i.e. to a project of rescuing
youthful, revolutionary ideas from the ageing, increasingly reactionary, and nation-
alistic hands.”40 Hence, the trial of Maurice Barrès can be perceived as a culmination
of a Dadaist use of an earlier existing state apparatus41 format to which they were
able to inject new rhetoric and anti-traditional concepts. It may have been that the
trial was a result of inner struggles for power and authority within the ranks of
Dada, but nevertheless, it succeeded in staging the old in close proximity to the
new and appropriating a state-organized format for the creation of a new perfor-
mance that crucifies both the past and the vanguards. It is in a sense an internal
critic that questions the Dada mechanism itself. The trial dichotomy is embedded

within it. On the one hand, it aims to outrage its audience and public, while at the
very same time it is concerned with confronting its own authenticity.
The façade of the accused Barrès, once an ally and a close visionary, was
taken down to reveal his true face as a right-wing conservative politician. In the
same manner, the trial suggests that Dada needs to see this as an alarming signal
indicating the danger that also awaits the group itself of becoming reactionary,
nationalist, and bourgeois. As Harding states, although “the question of whether
Dada actually has exhausted itself was taken for granted and never addressed […] it
constructed an analogy between Barrès and Dada.”42 It is the analogy between
Dada and Barrès that symbolizes the innate, inner, and outer struggles between the
reactionary and the progressive, which may explain Breton’s wish for the death
penalty for Barrès. Yet at this point, other and somewhat more practical questions
come to the surface: Could there be a trial in absence of the accused who left Paris
on that day43 and was represented in the trial in the form of a mannequin? Could
justice be achieved without the presence of the defendant, or does it fundamen-
tally undermine the whole process?
It is especially significant to consider that, in contrast to the missing Barrès,
the tribunal was at full occupancy, as it was composed by “a judge, two assistant
judges, the prosecution, and two counsels for the defense […] all of whom treated
the proceedings with the utmost seriousness […] and accompanied by a phalanx of
witnesses who testified to the public danger of the accused.”44 And not only did all
seem true and real in the conduct of the trial, for Breton, according to his biogra-
pher, “This was no parody, but the real thing—or as close as his lack of judicial
authority would allow.”45 In the absence of the defendant, the only opposition to
the trial was expressed by Tristan Tzara. This outstanding move can be understood
as part of the mistrust that formed in the volatile relation between Breton and
Tzara. However, the statement made by Tzara during the trial proves to extend
beyond mere personal disenchantment. Before leaving the stage and heading into
the streets, Tzara claimed to have “absolutely no confidence in justice even if that
justice is enacted by Dada.”46 Nevertheless, the trial went on and ended with Barrès
being found guilty based on testimonies given against him. Barrès was not sen-
tenced to death, as requested by Breton, but to twenty years of hard labour. This
verdict left both Barrès and Dada somewhat alive, as perhaps the fact that Tzara
left the event ignited a sense that after all, “Beneath the façade of avant-gardism,
The Trial was thus embedded in a discourse that cultivated conformity and that did
so under the aura of establishing, indeed in securing, objective truth and order.”47
The departure of Tzara can be perceived as his own interpretation of what it meant
to engage with the masses. It can be proclaimed that while Tzara called for a direct
engagement with the public by heading into the streets, Breton proposed or called
upon the creation of an alternative legal system to service the public. To him it was
clear that since the Dreyfus Affair and beyond, the judicial system had proven to be
corrupted and malfunctioning, also proven by the fact that a figure such as Barrès
escaped any kind of official state legal judgment.
The First Congress of The Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland

(JRMiP) – Between Congress and a Trial
Taking a leap to Yael Bartana’s first Congress of the Jewish Renaissance
Movement in Poland (JRMiP), it should be firstly stated that in Bartana’s project
one cannot speak of a direct visual investment into exploring the courtroom as a
space for investigation as has been the case in the Barrès trial. Nevertheless,
although Bartana does not specify that the congress function as a trial or a tribunal,
I shall seek to demonstrate how she has exercised the power to judge Israel/
Poland/the EU through rhetoric, parody, and public participation exercised prior to

and during the event, and also through exposing an alternative view of Jewish as
justice.
At an immediate glance, the first Congress of the “Jewish Renaissance Move-

ment in Poland (JRMiP)” organized by Bartana in 2012 in Berlin has little to do with
the mock trial organized by Breton in Paris. Dealing for the most part with the
history of the Zionist movement, Bartana had clearly titled the three-day event,
which was part of the Berlin Biennale and held at the Hebbel am Ufer Theatre, as a
“Congress” in direct reference to the first Zionist Congress, held in Basel Switzer-
land in 1897.48 Bartana’s project, which began in 2007 with a video titled Mary
Koszmary49 (nightmares), culminated by the time of the JRMiP congress in Berlin to
a fully fledged movement consisting of international registered members holding
membership cards, a flag, an identifiable symbol, a declared manifesto, etc. Main-
taining all along the way a blurred distinction between “real” and “fictional”,50
Bartana was able to position the movement on the border between being a politi-
cal engagement and being a fictional artistic project.
Organized around a roundtable bearing the symbol of the movement at its

centre, it is sufficient to acknowledge that the Congress had been directed to
engage with three main issues which were formalized as questions: “How should
the EU change in order to welcome the Other?”, “How should Poland change
within a re-imagined EU?”, and “How should Israel change to become part of the
Middle East?”51 Making an open call to the general public to join as delegates
during the gathering of the Congress, it was declared on the Congress’ website
prior to its opening that it seeks to “collectively imagine a new future and to formu-
late the concrete platform and demands of the movement.”52
The Congress embarked on a public reading of a letter written by the late

leader of the Movement, Sławomir Sierakowski.53 The letter, it was announced, was
found after Sierakowski’s assassination depicted in the third video of Bartana’s
Polish Trilogy titled Zamach (Assassination). In this fictitious letter, Sierakowski calls
for radical social change to be achieved by following the five proposals he desig-
nates at the end of his letter. Here I wish to stress how all of Sierakowski’s proposals
are clearly concerned with legal matters, as they advocate for the urgent need for a
legal amendment of Polish, Israeli, and European laws and constitutions: “1. Polish
citizenship to all immigrants! 2. Reintegration tax to cover the costs of moving 3.3
million Jews to Poland! 3. Hebrew as the second official language in Poland! 4.
Dismissal notice of the Polish state concerning the concordat with the Vatican
state—each religious institution should act on the same level! 5. Minorities House
instead of Senate in Polish Parliament!”.54
The lack of any legal authority in the format of the Congress did not, how-
ever, deter the delegates summoned by Bartana to actively participate in a highly
emotional debate. During the three-day event they proposed, outlined, and voted
on the future JRMiP agenda also through raising legal demands. The practicality of
the execution of those legal proposals did not seem to concern Bartana or the
delegates summoned to the Congress, just as the invitation set by Breton for a trial
of Maurice Barrès was made regardless of whether a legal actuality existed or not.
In both cases, participants were engaged in and with legal formats and themes,
while simultaneously ignoring the very premises on which they were conducted.
Merging an unclear dichotomy between life and art, reality and fiction, both the
Congress and the Barrès trial could be perceived as “a dissolution that also led to
the interpenetration of aesthetics and politics,”55 as argued by Demos in relation to
the Dada trial. Held ninety-one years apart on the very same day (the Barrès trial

on the 13th of May, while the Congress closed on the 13th of May), the two events
have more in common than meets the eye, not only in what they leave open,
blurred, or unravelled, but also in their goals and aspirations. Taking into account
the obvious obligatory differences, and of the clear, estranged gap existing between
two events taking place in different centuries, surroundings, and contexts, I aspire
to shed light on their intriguing commonalities (without overlooking their differ-
ences), and by doing so, offer a new examination on the past and current artistic
fascination and engagement with legal spaces.
A first step in the route to establishing similarities shared by the two projects
can be tracked in their original motivation. For Breton, the writer Maurice Barrès
was “one of the heroes of his adolescence”56 who betrayed their shared beliefs and
goals. Barrès’ political activism shifted from an early support in “anarchism, free-
dom and total individualism,” to an active involvement in right-wing politics, espe-
cially following the Dreyfus Affair, as he “changed his colours and turned right-
wing, nationalist and bourgeois.”57 Bartana, on the other hand, has been described
as acting as if she was a betrayed lover of Zionism.58 Pointing a blaming critical
finger towards Israel’s current state of affairs, Bartana’s post-Zionist approach in
her films cannot be ignored. Appropriating Zionist ideals and propaganda in “a kind
of reverse Zionism,”59 Bartana described herself as coming from a “very Zionist”60
family. She realizes her films, such as the Polish Trilogy, can be perceived as anti-Zi-
onist; however, she states that one should “…be very careful about using the term
anti-Zionist; maybe anti-Israel is a better way to say it.”61 Hence, both the Dada trial
and the Congress are motivated by their creators’ wish to tackle the impact of this
consequent reactionary development, and demand justice from those they once
perceived as open, liberal, and progressive. Determined to examine, with the par-
ticipation of the general public, the change that occurred and the responsibility this
entails, both events can be described through the manner in which Breton
explained the trial in his own words as a way “to determine the extent to which a
man could be held accountable if his will to power led him to champion conformist
values that diametrically opposed the ideas of his youth.”62
Moreover, the demands made by the delegates emerge from the past, but
only in order to make clear proposals for the future. While some have demanded
during the JRMiP Congress for the “EU to expand until it includes China”, many of
the demands (quoted in Bartana’s catalogue for the exhibition at the Secession
which was curated with the Congress as its centrepiece) included within it were
legal propositions such as “Polish citizenship to all immigrants; reintegration tax to
cover the cost of moving 3.3 million Jews to Poland; the state of Poland should
devote 15% of its annual budget to culture and arts […].”63 The direction of the
Congress, from the reading of the “last words” written by the movement’s late
leader, to the demands made during the three-day event, can be defined by the
same words used by art historian and critic T.J. Demos with regard to the Barrès
trial: “It transferred the forms of aesthetic creativity into legal affairs, so that an
intellectual’s political developments and ensuing contradictions could be publicly
debated and the offender held accountable within an unconventional courtroom
that was sui generis.”64
Realizing the Congress as a strategy beyond its immediate initial construc-

tion in relation to the Zionist Congress offers a needed acknowledgment in the
wide scope provided by Bartana. The broad reading of the Congress through a legal
prism is derived from the overreaching dimensions of the Congress itself. These
overarching attributes have been strongly established in the movement’s manifesto
that calls for the inclusion of “all those for whom there is no place in their home-

lands – the expelled and the prosecuted. There will be no discrimination in our
movement. We shall not ask about your life stories, check your residence cards or
question your refugee status […].”65 And although these embracing arms may seem
a mock of the nation state or a parody on the current state of anti-refugee acts and
laws in Europe just as in Israel, I suggest applying a more complex view of Bartana’s
project in the spirit and image of Dada. The political stances made by Bartana are
fruitful exactly because she maintains an ambivalent position between the serious
and mockery, between real life and art. Similarly to Dada, Bartana’s utilization of
the Congress offers a rearrangement of existing legal and political formats, which
opens possibilities for “reconfiguring art as a political issue, or asserting itself as
true politics.” 66 From the first video in the Polish Trilogy to the Congress, Bartana
asserts her aim towards a reconfiguration of the space between art and life, the real
and the imaginary. Releasing the JRMiP movement and its first Congress from the
immediate concerns of whether it is real or fictive opens a possibility of being nei-
ther true nor fictional. The perplexing thoughts and emotions evoked by Bartana’s
videos and Congress confirm the disruption of preconceived borders between a
legal discourse and artistic practice.
Long after the Dada trial claimed ownership of the format of the court “join-
ing aesthetic to ethical judgment and reinforcing it with (pretend) legal authority,”67
the JRMiP Congress continues to experiment with the artistic ability to transfer
aesthetics into political and legal spheres of action. Positioning the Congress as
space to discuss the great questions relating to the future of Europe or the Middle
East has enabled it to become a space for public debate, where legal and political
alternatives are intertwined and imagined even when presumably being far-fetched
and unconventional. Demos’ argument regarding the Dada trial is valid also for
Bartana’s conduct, in which “the aesthetic regime introduces continuity between
art and politics, such that aesthetics exceeds the realm of art by endowing the
political world with visible forms.” 68 Creating a platform in which there is “a pro-
ductive tension where neither term eclipses the other one,” 69 the Congress’ impact
is gained thought its fluctuated movement between aesthetics and politics without
clarifying any borders.
The Dreyfus Affair and Bartana’s JRMiP Congress

At this stage it is of importance to return to the Dreyfus Affair and relate it
to Bartana’s Congress just as I explored it previously in relation to Dada. Mention-
ing Proust and Barrès earlier on as two prominent figures for which the Dreyfus
trial played a pivotal turning point, I wish to include in this list a young journalist by
the name of Theodor Herzl, for whom the Dreyfus trial equally left an indelible
mark. Reporting from Paris on the Dreyfus Trial for the Austrian newspaper the
Neue Freie Presse, Herzl is better known as the founding father of Zionism. What
began as an observational report on the trial of Dreyfus gradually led Herzl in the
following years to organize the first Zionist Congress in Basel, which, as mentioned
above, provides the basis for Bartana’s Congress. Moreover, I shall argue, from a
contemporary standpoint, the Dreyfus Affair’s influence cannot be overlooked also
when dealing with Bartana’s Congress. As demonstrated by Jacqueline Rose, the
Dreyfus Affair has had a long and profound ongoing legacy and relevance in con-
temporary Israel. Rose eloquently describes the involvement of Proust in the Drey-
fus Affair and the impact his writing has had on French and European culture.
However, she does not halt there as her journey from Dreyfus, Proust, and Freud
leads her to Israel and to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “…from the heart of Europe
at the turn of the twentieth century to the Middle East, where the legacy of Drey-
fus is still being played out to this day.”70 Later in her book, Rose further states that,

“There is a line, we are often told, that runs from the Dreyfus Affair to the creation
of Israel as a nation.”71
The Congress created by Bartana does not give into the notion that with the
establishment of the Zionist movement by Herzl following the Dreyfus Trial the
idea of Jewish emancipation came to an end. There is a sense of a truth to drawing
a line from the Dreyfus Trial to the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel; how-
ever, as Rose also states, this is not the only valid story. Instead, she claims we
should “take from Dreyfus a warning—against an over-fervent nationalism, against
infallible armies raised to the level of theocratic principle, against an ethnic exclusiv-
ity that blinds a people to the other peoples of the world, and against governments
that try to cover up their own crimes.”72 Following this short introduction to Herzl,
it is worthwhile now to bring the figure of Bernard Lazare into the discussion.
Lazare’s unique personality and philosophy sheds a new light on the variety of
impacts the Dreyfus Affair has had among Jewish and Zionist scholars and activists.
It is a historical truth that the first Zionist Congress was initiated and presided by
Herzl, but it is the voice of Lazare that Bartana has been channeling as she decon-
structs the Zionist Congress into a Congress for her initiated Jewish Renaissance
Movement in Poland.
These two voices have already been examined by Hannah Arendt in a num-
ber of publications. In the comparison that Arendt draws between the two who
“had witnessed the Dreyfus trial, and both were profoundly transformed by the
experience,”73 she writes that they “were turned into Jews by anti-Semitism […] For
them their Jewish origin had a political and national significance,”74 yet it came to
be that “Herzl’s views dominated twentieth-century Zionism whereas Lazare had
become a pariah among his own people, dying in poverty and obscurity.”75
On Being Jewish and On Justice

As baffling as the JRMiP Congress might seem to be in its intersection of
truth and fiction, of legal matters and imagination, Bartana’s artistic manoeuvre is
based on creating and facilitating a frame in which differing or even negating pow-
ers and ideologies can form an encounter.76 In the most immediate way, one can say
that Bartana appropriates Herzl’s first Zionist Congress in order to implement into
it diverting views.77 One example for this is the turning of the Congress to an all-
inclusive event dealing with universal and global issues to which not only Jews were
invited. Titled the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, by the time the Con-
gress took place, it has been clearly stated that the movement is open to all nation-
alities and religions, just as to all refugees and to stateless people. This ambivalence,
from the one side the movement keeping the “Jewish” in its title, while from the
other side defining and providing a framework open to all, is crucial to the under-
standing of the aim for justice called upon by the Congress. I will argue that the
perception of the Congress by Bartana as a space demanding legal justice offers us
a path to understanding part of the ambiguity of the Congress, which lies precisely
in the tension between Jewish and non-Jewish; between being inclusive to being
exclusive. In order to achieve this, I need to return at this stage, as promised earlier
above, to the Dreyfus Affair, and more precisely to Bernard Lazare.
In her writings, Hannah Arendt considers Lazare the epiphany of a “con-

scious pariah”78 alongside other notable figures such as Heinrich Heine, Rahel Varn-
hagen, and Franz Kafka. According to Arendt, it was Lazare who translated the
position of the pariah into a political discourse: “Living in the France of the Dreyfus
affair, Lazare could appreciate at first hand the pariah quality of Jewish existence.”79
Furthermore, Arendt argued that Lazare was aware that a solution to Jewish prose-
cution was not in exclusion, as Herzl advocated, but through building alliances with

other minorities and prosecuted people: “The emancipated Jew must awake to an
awareness of his position and, conscious of it, become a rebel against it—the cham-
pion of an oppressed people.” In doing so, and by entering the space of politics,
“Lazare’s idea was, therefore, that the Jew should come out openly as the repre-
sentative of the pariah […] He wanted him to stop seeking release in an attitude of
superior indifference or in lofty and rarefied cogitation about the nature of man
per se.”80 Another important text by Arendt to be mentioned in the context of
Bartana’s Congress is titled “Herzl and Lazare”. In describing the different positions
each of the two prominent figures took following the Dreyfus trial, Arendt stresses
that when hearing the mob crying “Death to the Jews!”, Lazare “realized at once
that from now on he was an outcast and accepted the challenge.”81 In contrast to
Herzl, for whom the event prompted him to write his book The Jewish State, where
he argues for the need of a particular state dedicated only to the Jewish nation,
Lazare directed his efforts in a more universal direction “as a conscious Jew, fight-
ing for justice in general but for the Jewish people in particular.”82 Herzl planned an
“escape or deliverance in a homeland,” while for Lazare “the territorial question
was secondary.”83 Unlike Herzl, whose translation of the Dreyfus trial has been in
seeing anti-Semitism as a deeply-rooted, not-to-be-solved problem, Lazare sought
to find in France and in the rest of Europe “real comrades-in-arms, whom he hoped
to find among all the oppressed groups of contemporary Europe.”84
Almost completely ignored by France’s Jewry and failing to reach out to

others in Europe, Lazare was unable to embark on his mission to find allies among
the weak and the persecuted. Yet, Lazare’s aspirations eagerly inhabit Bartana’s
project and its accompanying manifesto as it declares, “We shall be strong in our
weakness.”85 “We Shall be Strong in Our Weakness. Notes from the First Congress
of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland” was also the name of a perfor-
mance directed by Bartana in 2010 at the Hebbel am Ufer, the same theatre that
would host her Congress two years later. The similarities in the vocabulary and
actions offered by Bartana can be easily traced in the thinking of Lazare.
Not only did Lazare fail to succeed in forming an alliance among Jews and
Christians in Europe during his time, he has also been cast to an ultimate oblivion.
At the final footnote of Arendt article on Herzl and Lazare, she mentions the con-
tribution of the French writer, poet, and Dreyfusard Charles Péguy, who wrote a
memoir Le portrait de Bernard Lazare, which saved Lazare’s memory from fading
with no return. Interestingly enough, Lazare’s writings and ideas are gaining new
recognition and new followers, such as Jacqueline Rose who in the introduction of
her book quoted in the chapter “Proust among the Nations,” she describes Lazare
as “a key player and for me a hero of this drama.”86 Rose’s reading of the Dreyfus
Affair alongside his contemporaries, such as Freud and Proust, offers an insight into
the way the Dreyfus Affair has been crucial to the intellectual development of
European writers and scholars at that time and all the way to our days. Although
not focusing her investigation on Lazare, Rose identifies him as “the first public
defender of Dreyfus.”87 More importantly, Lazare is acknowledged by Rose as
remarkably prophetic political thinker who had had the capacity to envision a dif-
ferent lesson from the anti-Semitism erupting in France during and following the
Dreyfus Affair to the one offered by Herzl. Born to a Jewish family in the Southern
part of France, Lazare’s upbringing and education did not have much to do with
forming a Jewish identity.88 As mentioned earlier, in the same manner as Herzl,
Lazare was forced to be confronted with being Jewish during the Dreyfus trial. The
hatred showed by the masses to Jews sent him down this path; however, for him it
meant that “I am a Jew and I know nothing about the Jews.”89 According to Rose,
“For Lazare, therefore, being a Jew did not mean an exclusive ethnic identity. It was

more like a project, an identity to be discovered and forged against hatred, as well
as a form of continuous self-education.”90
As Lazare understood himself to be a Jew without religious conviction, the

question that remained open to probing has been—how and what can be the con-
tent of his non-religious faith? His answer as quoted by Rose was, “I belong to the
race of those […] who were first to introduce the idea of justice into the world. […]
All of them, each and every one, my ancestors, my brothers, wanted, fanatically,
that right should be done to one and all, and that injustice should never tip unfairly
the scales of the law.”91 In the words of Léon Blum introduced by Rose at the open-
ing of her book, “Just as science is the religion of the positivists, justice is the reli-
gion of the Jew.”92 From this point of understanding Jewish as justice, I wish to
draw the parallel to Bartana’s project. Defending her position as not anti-Zionist,
Bartana quite similarly to Lazare, who was a Zionist and worked at the beginning
along with Herzl, sets to bring into a Zionist platform—the Congress—voices long
forgotten such as that of Lazare. Through a contemporary investigation, Bartana
invites us to imagine the Zionist movement anew. And she does this very much in
accordance with Lazare, as it is safe to say, that each of them embarked on a quest
to uncover and bestow new content and relevant meaning to what it is to be Jewish
just as much as to what it is to seek and perform justice.
Avi Feldman (Born in Montreal, Canada) is based in Tel-Aviv and Berlin where he
works as a curator and writer. Since 2013, Feldman is a PhD candidate at The Research
Platform for Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Cultural Studies, Practice-Based Doctoral
Programme - collaboration between University of Reading (UK) and the Postgraduate
Programme in Curating, Zurich University for the Arts (CH). As part of this programme his
thesis focuses on examining contemporary reciprocal relations between the fields of art and
law.
Among other projects, Feldman has been the director and co-curator of Vdance
International Video and Dance Festival at the Tel-Aviv Cinematheque, and associate curator
for avant-garde film at The Jerusalem International Film Festival. Recently, he has co-
curated the exhibition ‘Set in Motion’ at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, and ‘Imagine the
Law’ (2013) at FKSE Budapest. Among his latest publication is ‘Extremum – Reflections on
the work of Yasmeen Godder’, which he also edited; and contributed texts to Jonas Staal’s
Ideological Guide to the Venice Biennale 2013, and for Yael Bartana’s performance ‘Two
Minutes of Standstill’, Impulse Biennale 2013. Feldmann is taking part in the “Research
Platform for Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Cultural Studies, Practice-Based Doctoral
Programme”.

JRMiP Congress

Notes 27 Ibid. page 51.

1 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art 28 Ibid.
and the Politics of Spectatorship, Verso, 2012, page 7. 29 Ibid.
2 In her introduction to the collection of 30 Demos states that Breton went to observe
essays “The Dada Seminars” published in 2005, Leah hearings at the Palais de Justice prior to the mock
Dickerman points out to the lack of research on the trial “to study the procedural aspects of litigation,”
Dada movement, unlike extensive research done on page 142.
Russian Constructivism and Surrealism. “There have 31 See Bishop, page 73.
been relatively few sustained efforts to examine the 32 See Demos, page 140.
premises of Dada practice in broad view, to under- 33 See Demos discussion of an earlier Dada
stand either its structural workings or the significance event and visit to St.-Julian, page141.
of its activities within a historical field.” 34 See Demos, page 141.
3 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art 35 See Harding, page 29.
and the Politics of Spectatorship, Verso, 2012, page 66 36 Ibid, page 35.
4 Ibid, page 72 37 Ibid., page 30.
5 T.J. Demos, “Dada’s Event,” Communities of 38 “The Dada Season…denotes a period of
Sense, ed. Jaleh Mansoor et al., Durham, N.C.: Duke fracture within the group; specifically, it testifies to
University Press, 2010, page 141-2. increased tension between Breton, Tzara and Francis
6 Ibid., page 142. Picabia.” See Bishop, page 67.
7 James M. Harding, The Ghosts of the Avant- 39 See Harding, page 30.
Garde (s), The University of Michigan Press, 2013. 40 See Harding, page 30.
8 Ibid., page 28. 41 For a more in-depth exploration on state
9 Ibid., page 28. apparatuses in relation to Althusser, please see
10 See Bishop, page 66. chapter two my upcoming PhD thesis.
11 T.J. Demos, page 135. 42 See Harding, page 35.
12 Harding “Dadaist performances were 43 See Demos “The defendant Barres was
“patterned after cabaret shows;” yet the lack of invited but unable to attend, as he was already
creative innovation eventually left its practitioners committed to a prior engagement in Aix-en-
“discontented, hardly proud of the pitiful carnival Provence, where he was to discuss ‘The French Soul
ruses”, page 138. during the War’.” page 142.
13 See Harding, page 29. 44 See Harding, page 37.
14 David Drake, French Intellectuals and Politics 45 See Demos, page 142.
from the Dreyfus Affair to the Occupation, Palgrave 46 See Harding, page 38.
Macmillan, 2005, page 13. 47 See Harding, page 39.
15 Adam Gopnik, “Trial of the Century,” The 48 “The Congress, in which 197 delegates
New Yorker, September 28, 2009. participate, accepts the Basle Program: Zionism
16 David Drake, French Intellectuals and Politics strives to create for the Jewish people a home in
from the Dreyfus Affair to the Occupation, Palgrave Palestine secured by public law […] Herzl writes in his
Macmillan, 2005, page 21. diary: “At Basle I founded the Jewish State. If I said
17 Jacqueline Rose, Proust among the Nations, this out loud today I would be greeted by universal
The University of Chicago Press, 2011, page 26. laughter. In five years perhaps, and certainly in fifty
18 Ibid., page 5. years, everyone will perceive it.” From The Zionist
19 See footnote 6. Archives - http://www.zionistarchives.org.il/en/
20 Zeev Sternhell, “National Socialism and datelist/Pages/Congress1.aspx
Antisemitism: The Case of Maurice Barres,” Journal of 49 Mary Koszmary was the first part in what is
Contemporary History, Vol. 8, No. 4, Sage Publications, known to be The Polish Trilogy dealing “with the
1973, page 47. Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, demanding
21 Ibid., page 48. the return of 3,300,000 Jews to Poland. The films
22 Ibid., page 56. Mary Koszmary (Nightmare, 2007), Mur I Wieza (Wall
23 Ibid., page 57-8. and Tower, 2009), and Zamach (Assassination, 2011)
24 See Bishop, page 66. were chosen to represent Poland at the 54th Venice
25 See Bishop, page 66. Biennale. From the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art web-site:
26 Zeev Sternhell, page 48. http://www.tamuseum.org.il/about-the-exhibition/

yael-bartana 67 Ibid., page 143.

50 The consistent debate of whether The Polish 68 Ibid., page 143.
Trilogy and congress are real or unreal is evident in 69 Ibid., page 145.
numerous articles all pointing to this space of contra- 70 Jacqueline Rose, Proust among the Nations,
diction emphasized by Bartana. See, just for example, The University of Chicago Press, 2011, page 10.
the Art News article by Robin Cembalest posted on 18 71 Ibid., page 60.
April 2013, or The Guardian article by Laura Cumming 72 Ibid., page 61.
published on 13 May 2012. 73 Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt And The
51 http://www.jrmip.org/ Jewish Question, The MIT Press, 1996, page 46.
52 See http://www.jrmip.org/ 74 Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings,
53 Sierakowski who plays the protagonist in Schocken Books, 2007, page 338.
Bartana’s Polish Trilogy of videos, is himself a Polish 75 Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt And The
scholar and political activist and founder of the Jewish Question, The MIT Press, 1996, page 46-7.
Krytyka Polityczna movement in Poland. In the first 76 For a thorough discussion on the concept
video he delivers a speech calling 3.3 million of Jews of the encounter, see chapter 2 of my upcoming PhD
to return to Poland. In the second video ‘Mur I dissertation.
Wieza’ Sierakowski is already presented as a leader 77 Here again, one notices a similar artistic act
with followers erecting a wall and tower or Kibutz in shared both by Bartana and Dada. Bartana begins
Warsaw, while the third video opens with Sierakows- from the Zionist Congress in order to exhaust it and
ki’s funeral as a mass movement of people gathering to pour into it newly imagined content, just as Dada
from all over the world to attend his almost state did with the format of the court, or the French
official funeral. tribunal.
54 See http://www.jrmip.org/ 78 Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings,
55 See Demos, page 138. Schocken Books, 2007, page 274.
56 Wayne Andrews, The Surrealist Parade, New 79 Ibid., page 283.
Directions Publishing Corporation, 1990, page 38. 80 Ibid., page 284.
57 See Bishop, page 72. 81 Ibid., page 338.
58 In an article published in Hebrew in the 82 Ibid., page 338.
Ha’aretz newspaper on 18 April 2008, under the title 83 Ibid., page 339.
“Leni Riefenstahl, just the other way around”, Bartana 84 Ibid., page 339-340.
is described as holding a position towards Israel of a 85 See footnote 66.
disappointed lover, and she is quoted saying she is 86 Jacqueline Rose, Proust Among the Nations,
not “an Israeli hater […] and I do things out of love for The University of Chicago Press, 2011, page 10.
this country […] in spite of all the criticism I have here 87 Ibid., page 57.
is my home. 88 Ibid., page 58.
59 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/ 89 Ibid., page 58.
arts/design/yael-bartana-and-europe-will-be- 90 Ibid., page 58.
stunned.html 91 Ibid., page 59.
60 http://tabletmag.com/scroll/110143/ 92 Ibid., page 21.
israeli-artist-yael-bartana-in-denmark
61 http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/
news-features/previews/return-an-interview-with-
yael-bartana-/
62 See Bishop, page 72.
63 Yael Bartana, Wenn Ihr wollt, ist es kein Traum,
Secession 2013, Revolver Verlag.
64 T.J. Demos, “Dada’s Event,” Communities of
Sense, ed. Jaleh Mansoor et al., Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 2010, page 143.
65 For a visual representation of the manifesto
and reading its text - http://1vze7o2h8a2b2tyah-
l3i0t68.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/
uploads/2013/04/Manifesto.jpg
66 See Demos, page 141.

World that Matter and the Radical Imaginery Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research
“Something that has to

do with life itself”
World of Matter and
the Radical Imaginary
by Brian Holmes
In the antechamber of the exhibition there is a parable.1 For centuries the
fisherfolk of Urk lived on an island in the middle of the Zuidersee. Then in 1932 the
Dutch government decided to build dikes against the ocean. The island is now
anchored on dry land. It must have been as if the world had turned upside down.
Yet the film Episode of the Sea, by Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan, does
not really explain why the fisherfolk of Urk remained attached to their ancient
trade. Instead it is all about the present. Images of nets tell a story of deep entan-
glement in the regulations of the European Union. You are encountering an age-old
way of life that has always had to deal with human transformations of the environ-
ment.
How to face the natural crisis of global society? How to engage with the
overwhelming material conditions of the Anthropocene? In the year 2014, aware-
ness of human-induced global warming seemed to reach a kind of planetary tip-
ping-point. Yet, earlier experiences like the Fukushima meltdown, the BP oil spill, or
the flooding of New Orleans show that profound shocks to consciousness can be
erased by dull, everyday reinforcements of the industrial norm. The point is to go
beyond just reacting to the next inevitable flood or blowout. If we want to break
the cycle of disaster, public outcry and induced denial, then changes in our mental
maps, or indeed, in our shared cosmologies, must be followed by transformations
of our social institutions. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to begin exactly where
World of Matter does, with the institutions of representation. 2 At stake is the rela-
tion between the capacity to make images of worldly things and the capacity to
remake an inhabitable world.
I'd like to kick off this review with a philosophical proposal. The link between
image and world is at the heart of what the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis calls
the “imaginary institution of society.” For him, the radical imaginary is “the capacity
to posit that which is not, to see in something that which is not there.”3 But the
question is not whether this is done, for all societies are so instituted. The question is
what do we invent, how do we see the world? How do we institute a new territory, a
new reality? If we could learn to perceive other things than the objects of our
desires, other beings than ourselves alone, then the radical imagination could pro-
vide the missing key to a currently unthinkable planetary democracy. For Castori-
adis, emancipation is the process whereby the collective self (autos) creates its own
laws (nomos). This is done, not only through negotiation over meaningful words, but
also through the circulation of affective images. As he writes: “I call autonomous a
society that not only knows explicitly that it has created its own laws but has insti-

tuted itself
t so as to free its radical imaginary and enable itself to alter its institu-
tions through collective, self-reflective, and deliberate activity.”4
Today the societies of the so-called developed world have no such auton-
omy. We cannot even imagine the collectivity, let alone the laws or the norms that
could resolve the natural crisis of global society. The very possibility of change
remains invisible, like a spirit in a rock that you can’t see. Yet that missing spirit may
have everything to do with your own material survival. A foundational role awaits
for artistic images at grips with the planetary real.
The exhibition and web platform World of Matter follows crisscrossed paths
through a number of major processes whereby humans are transforming the land,
the water, and the atmosphere. For this ongoing visual research, a core group of
some ten authors carries out documentary probes, cartographic renderings, scien-
tific explorations, and juridical analyses of worldly matters that include oil and
mineral extraction, industrialized and organic agriculture, dams, water-works and
fisheries. The results so far have been shown in Dortmund, Germany, at the CUNY
Graduate Center in New York, and the Concordia University in Montreal, with
further showings coming up in Stockholm and Minneapolis.5 The majority of the
videos, photographs, maps and texts can be consulted at www.worldofmatter.net.
They focus on human and non-human actors, at scales from macro to micro.
Let’s start from the beginning: Ursula Biemann’s Egyptian Chemistry, which
opens the tightly packed exhibition in New York. We’re greeted by a display of
laboratory flasks and beakers, echoing a video image projected high against the
back of the gallery, showing a white-coated scientist manipulating the same equip-
ment. A tracery of the meandering Nile runs laterally along deep blue walls, guiding
the eye toward a lower projection that shows casually dressed locals gathering
water samples from the river bank. To the right, three small monitors hang in a row,
head high, each with dangling headphones. The invitation is clear: it’s time to take
the plunge into complex narratives. At stake in each fragmentary sequence is the
overwhelming agency of the river, whose bounteous and destructive floods have
given rise to the water-management projects of successive “hydraulic civilizations.”
How does the Nile flow today?
With delicately chosen documentary clips informed by off-screen or full-face

interviews, the videos tell of dam-building campaigns, irrigation technologies, peas-
ant struggles in the countryside and scientific testing and modelling of the river’s
currents. The atmospheric physicist Carl Hodges describes utopian schemes to
plant carbon-absorbing mangroves in seawater canals for the production of food,
animal feed, and biofuels. Standing ankle deep in the tide with his sport coat and
jaunty leather hat, Hodges rejoins the long line of Faustian inventors and develop-
ers portrayed in Marshall Berman’s scathingly critical book, All That Is Solid Melts
Into Air. A scandalous sense of hubris gathers around those who want to change the
very face of the earth, or in this case, to lay their own hand on the waters. Yet in the
face of famines and penuries to come, one can also feel inspired by this visionary
scientist.
Other modernization campaigns—like making the desert bloom with irriga-

tion and antibiotics—do not look anywhere near so good. We see the tubes and
wheels of an automated sprinkler rolling across parched soil like the skeleton of
some silvery dinosaur. Eschewing pyramids or mummies and looking from the
present to the future, Biemann evokes the processes of coevolution that have fash-
ioned the Egyptian landscape. Inside a warehouse-like structure we see scale mod-

els of the flowing river and its associated control devices (dams, locks, hydroelectric
power generators, etc). Fragmentary captions flash up on the screen: “Millennia of
engineers / who measure and calculate / draw plans and build models.” We are
being asked to conceive how the mind articulates vast material transformations.
This show has it own very powerful philosophical debate, provided by think-
ers like Michel Serres, Donna Haraway, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Jane
Bennet, and Bruno Latour. At the close of Ursula Biemann’s series, Harman himself
appears against the chemical background of tear gas floating into the compound of
Cairo’s American University where he teaches. The key concepts of his object-ori-
ented ontology are evoked in a few phrases. “All knowledge is oblique, all knowl-
edge is an allusion,” he says. “You can never get back to the absolute knowledge
because you cannot translate a thing into any form of relation.” In this philosophy—
which is also called “speculative realism” —objects inevitably withdraw from direct
access. Things exist autonomously, on their own terms, without correlation to the
human world; they are irreducible to the vagaries of our perception. Yet by the
same token, “any real relation automatically becomes a new object”—that is to say, a
mental phenomenon, a thing for humans, or what Castoriadis might call a figment of
the radical imaginary. “That’s the political level,” Harman explains, wiping his eyes
against the tear gas. “But I would also say that I do not feel the need to ground
everything in politics. This idea that the cash value of any philosophy is its political
virtues is in a way the last phase of correlationist philosophy.”
Cash values aside, it’s very hard to see how any valid philosophy could elude
contemporary politics. But Biemann translates Harman’s thinking into her own
exploratory practice, attentive to the complex actor-networks that shape the Nile
ecology. The point is to pay attention to the things themselves, to look outside the
closure of specific cultural frames. Then we become aware of new agencies. As we
read on the gallery wall: “Metachemistry is a planetary narration that alludes to the
earth as a mighty chemical body where the crackling noise of the forming and
breaking of molecular bonds can be heard at all times.” So where does metachemis-
try touch political flesh?
Turn the corner for one answer. A giant Dymaxion map spreads out above a
vitrine filled with texts and objects. On Buckminster Fuller’s defamiliarizing cartog-
raphy, Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer have located container ship
bottlenecks, rare earth deposits, oil and immigration choke points—geographical
sites where the limits to global growth become starkly evident. Each dot on the
map warns of future crises. “It is here that we find the call for a new ecological
understanding coalescing with the call for a new political economy,” reads the wall
text. Technoscience makes the molecular global. Case studies of disaster-prone
environments are presented in the vitrines below, initiating us to a vertiginous
telescoping of scales.
Take a few steps further: images of huge, highly rationalized fields spring into
view. You’re flying in the air, you’re trapped inside an endless factory, you’re gazing
upon night-dark furrows stippled with bright flocks like snow. Below these large
projections, a line-up of four small monitors guides you though a planet planted in
cotton. From Brazil to India to Texas to Burkina Faso, Uwe Martin conducts report-
age-style interviews with peasants, so-called “conventional” farmers, agro-ecologi-
cal researchers, organic pioneers, and the food activist Vandana Shiva. Gradually
you realize that this distant subject is really very close to your own skin. The global
scale shrinks down to the shirt you are wearing. The planter Gilsen Pinesso
recounts how he transferred GMO methods from Brazil to the rich black soil of the

Sudan, where he was invited by a government minister. For ten uncomfortable

minutes, a cotton-grower from the Global South looks us straight in the eye and
talks pure corporate strategy. “The Sudanese farmers will take some time to inter-
nalize all this know-how, all this technology,” he explains, predicting a ten-year lapse
before they complete their rendezvous with capitalist destiny.
Those trained in the subtleties of contemporary art tend to shudder when

they encounter this kind of blunt reportage. Rightly so: because it reveals, or even
embodies, the banal and continuous violence that links us all into the contempo-
rary division of labour.
In the past, vanguard political artists engaged their struggles by means of

shocking divides, in symbolic portrayals of military conflicts, sexual rifts, labour
hierarchies, commodity fetishes, and excluded or self-assertive others. For them,
ideology was understood in structuralist terms, as a violently deterministic relation
between individual lives and fundamental symbolic categories. The role of the artist
or theorist was to lift the veil of particulars and show these structures at work in
your own life. At best, an existential breakthrough might open the floodgates of
emancipation. The artists in World of Matter take a very different approach. They
develop an ecological vision that includes human involvement at every turn. By
focusing on concrete geographical relations such as the circulation of goods, tech-
nologies, and scientific concepts, they trace out a metonymic skein that ultimately
forces us to recognize ourselves as functioning parts of the global whole. The
shock, if that’s still the word, comes not from a split but a suture. We are all Gilsen
Pinesso, but each with our particular specialties. The coherence of the global sys-
tem is the radical imaginary of contemporary capitalism itself: a pervasive just-in-
time economy whose ubiquitous flow-objects are not only at your fingertips, but
also inside you, as world-pictures that you continually recreate and propagate
through your professional activity. Ideology is neither a veil nor a pair of heavy
chains, but an actively maintained connection between endless sequences of
images. At the root (at the radical level) the capitalist world economy is a socially
instituted fiction.
Yet reality, as Harman reminds us, remains distinct from all merely human
correlations. The strength of World of Matter is to present itself, not as fully inte-
grated single narrative, but as distinct and recombinable files, fragmentary testimo-
nies from a hearing that is still in progress. Its strength to let the world break down
into real complexity, so that “the crackling noise of the forming and breaking of
molecular bonds can be heard at all times.” So how does chemistry dissolve into
materialist politics?
Sit down to Paulo Tavares’ work: Non-Human Rights. Now you’re in for a long
and fascinating journey through the indigenous struggles of the 1990s in Ecuador,
leading up to the country’s new 2008 Constitution, which recognized the rights of
nature, or better, of La Pachamama. Scenes of rural protesters and landscapes
devastated by oil and mineral extraction alternate with quotations from the Michel
Serres’ 1900 book, The Natural Contract. Look at the settling ponds in the jungle,
where Texaco pumped billions of gallons of toxic effluents from its wells. As indige-
nous activist Luis Macas recounts: “We’re fighting for something that has to do
with life itself.” But that living reality is inseparable from a cultural idea. At the end
of the video, Tavares addresses himself directly to the environmentalist Esperanza
Martínez: “It is said that Modernity is that system in which there is one nature and
various cultures, right? But what you are saying is different. There exist various
different natures.” “Yes,” she replies. “Precisely as many as there are cultures.”

A subtle tension runs throughout this project, between the anthropological

claim that human groups create their own distinct worlds and the central philo-
sophical claim of object-oriented ontology, which is that reality withdraws from any
merely human correlation. This contradiction between the two approaches
becomes explicit in Tavares’ video, where the scenes of extractivist devastation are
preceded by inter-titles evoking “object-oriented violence.” Again this is a reference
to Michel Serres, who forcefully shows how human beings make war on the rest of
the living world. But it is also an attack on object-oriented thinking. The implication
is that philosophy must never neglect its ecological context, lest it participate in
unbearable atrocities.
Nonetheless, Graham Harman’s philosophy is vindicated in this same work,

although in terms he would probably not himself accept. For the “natural contract”
of which it is question here springs into being through the recognition of hitherto
ignored and discounted material things—rocks, trees, soil, air—which the indigenous
people conceive as inseparable from “spirits of the forest.” There is foundational
potential in that which withdraws from Western instrumental rationality.
I began this review with the notion of the radical imaginary: a raw psychic
representation of the world which is normed and stabilized by social institutions,
but which can also break away, reconfigure itself, and take new roots among the
community of living beings—on the condition that social institutions are themselves
transformed to match the new vision. For Castoriadis, that transformation begins
when individuals and groups start to recognize that the only guarantee of their
own autonomy, of their own emancipation and pathway to a good life, is to be
found in common norms and laws that guarantee good living for others. What
World of Matter tries to do—with some help from both Michel Serres and the specu-
lative realists—is to extend this democratic process to non-humans.
Let’s close with a short proposal by Mabe Bethônico, an artist-researcher

from Belo Horizonte, Brazil. It’s the “Museum of Public Concerns,” improvised on
the ground in the face of the privatization of cultural institutions by mining compa-
nies in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. The recipe for institutional autonomy is
disarmingly simple: involve sociologists, media theorists, anthropologists and artists
in the creation of a mobile museum that could present precisely those things that
corporate culture skips over—notably the histories of oil and mineral extraction.
Plans unfold on the video screen for a DIY display structure that looks eminently
practical. Only such an activist approach can deal with “matters of public concern.”
Yet what else is World of Matter doing, on a website and in a university rather than
out on the streets?
There may be an invitation here. Download the videos, put them in your
bicycle- or solar-powered vehicle, and show them to everyone you meet. Treat
them just like material things that have to do with life itself. It’s high time to make a
break with our own normalized ways of creating and propagating world-pictures.
Don’t imagine the apocalypse, that’s old hat. Just bring your radical imagination to
focus on the end of global capitalism.

This text was published online, see http://midwestcompass.org/something-

that-has-to-do-with-life-itself/
The World of Matter book is published, Sternberg Press Berlin/New York, 2015
http://www.geobodies.org
http://www.worldofmatter.net
Brian Holmes is an art and cultural critic with a taste for on-the-ground interven-
tion. Living in Paris from 1990 to 2009, he collaborated with political art groups such as Ne
Pas Plier, Bureau d’Etudes, Public Netbase, Hackitectura, Makrolab, and published in Multi-
tudes, Springerin, and Brumaria. With Claire Pentecost and the 16 Beaver Group he co-
organized the Continental Drift seminars. His essays revolve around art, free cooperation,
the network society, politicaleconomy, and grassroots resistance. His books include Escape
the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society and Unleashing the Collective Phantoms:
Essays in Reverse Imagineering. In Chicago, where he now lives, he is a member of the Com-
pass group and teaches at the University of Illinois. Recent collaborative projects can be seen
at http://southwestcorridornorthwestpassage.org and http://midwestcompass.org/water-
sheds/map.html. Text archive of older work at http://brianholmes.wordpress.com.
Notes
1 A review of the show at CUNY Graduate Center, New York, Septem-
ber-November 2014. World of Matter was presented by Ursula Biemann at the
“Curating Everything” symposium.
2 World of Matter is an international art and media project initiated by an
interdisciplinary group of artists and scholars investigating primary materials and
the complex ecologies of which they are a part. Participants include Mabe
Bethônico, Ursula Biemann, Uwe Martin & Frauke Huber, Elaine Gan, Helge
Mooshammer and Peter Moertenboeck, Emily Scott, Paulo Tavares and Lonnie van
Brummelen & Siebren de Haan,
3 C. Castoriadis, “The State of the Subject Today,” in World in Fragments:
Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, tr. D. A. Curtis, (Stan-
ford University Press, 1997), p. 151.
4 C. Castoriadis, “Psychoanalysis and Politics,” ibid., p. 132.
5 Exhibitions took place in the following venues: WORLD OF MATTER - On
the Global Ecologies of Raw Material, at HMKV Dortmund, March-June 2014, and at
James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, September-November 2014;
WORLD OF MATTER – Exposing Resource Ecologies, at Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery,
Concordia University Montreal, February-April 2015. World of Matter conferences
run parallel to the exhibition opening. The World of Matter book is published by
Sternberg Press Berlin/New York, 2015. http://events.worldofmatter.net

1 2
3 4
5 6
Captions
1 World of Matter, van Brummelen de Haan,
Episode of the Sea
2 World of Matter, Biemann, Egyptian, Chemis-
try, © Hannes Woidich
3 World of Matter, map, Peter Helge Dortmund
4 World of Matter, © Yoko Dupuis
5 World of Matter, Uwe Martin, Landrush
6 World of Matter, Tavares, Non Human Rights,
© Hannes Woidich
7 World of Matter, website
7

The Curator and Her Double Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research
The Curator and Her Double.

The Cruelty of the Avatar
by Ellen Blumenstein
Echte Kultur wirkt durch den Überschwang und durch ihre Kraft, das europäische Kunstideal
hingegen zielt darauf ab, den Geist auf eine von der Kraft geschiedene Haltung zu verweisen,
die deren Überschwang zuschaut.
Antonin Artaud, Das Theater und sein Double1
“True culture operates by exaltation and force, while the European ideal
of art attempts to cast the mind into an attitude distinct from force
but addicted to exaltation.”
Wir werden uns fragen, was diesem Schicksal der Grausamkeit entsprechend “ausstellen”
(exposer) bedeutet, und es wird darum gehen, etwas eher Schlägen als Blicken
“aus-zu-setzen” (ex-poser).
Jacques Derrida: Artaud2
Why do people visit museums? What specific impact are exhibitions able to
achieve? General as these questions may seem, they nevertheless underlie all cura-
torial activity—or at least they ought to. For, occupied with their impassioned and
self-centred rivalry over “authorship”—that is, over visibility and recognition—those
engaged in the art world are neglecting a far more significant present-day problem,
namely the fact that the museum, reduced to having to justify itself in economic
terms, is increasingly degenerating into a temple of amusement for bored consum-
ers and thereby losing sight of its social function and the responsibility that comes
with it. In the spirit of Antonin Artaud and his concept of cruelty, which demands
that one should relentlessly call into question one’s own ideas about reality and
[man’s] poetic place in reality and force the spectator to do likewise, the “avatar”
represents an attempt to become aware of those ideas oneself and to make them
visible and palpable to visitors. This project, a collaboration between an artist (Ulf
Aminde) and a curator (Ellen Blumenstein), sets out to champion the role of institu-
tions by providing art with options for action and room to maneuver.
What does a visitor, a critic, an artist, or a colleague expect when a curator

introduces [his or] her program? Very few tend to reflect on their own—probably
differing—expectations, but most of them nevertheless react according to them,
since these necessarily precede any reception of both the broader outlines and the
single projects within an institutional program. Anticipating these expectations, the
curator will base her decisions on the institution’s profile—an implicit, but consen-
sual image formed by the members of the field (which, by agreeing upon a limited
set of rules, qualify as a group through the very same process). She will aim to mark
(and prove) her rank, and develop a program on the basis of those inner-circle
expectations.
On the one hand, these kinds of conventions are necessary for any existing
structure, because not a single proposition can be made without the distinguishing

borderst between one field and the next. On the other hand, though, if invariably
applied, the same rules would obstruct any development or change within that
given field. All players in a defined context are therefore constantly negotiating
their roles between protecting the status quo and testing its boundaries.
In today’s art world, however, this balance has been upset, as the burden for
keeping the system in flux has been delegated exclusively to the artist, while the
position of the other members is strictly regulated: the curator facilitates the art-
ist’s interests, the institution provides space for artworks to unfold their “presence”,
the critic communicates the latest trends, and the visitor is elevated by the sublime
experience.3 At first sight, at least, this situation seems to be comfortable for the
artist. But if s/he is the sole appointed agent of experimentation and the only one
permitted to claim authorship, then any attempt to truly renegotiate the terms of
activity and provide differing perspectives is rendered impossible, since there is no
one left to counter this challenge. As a result, not even the artists themselves bene-
fit from their seemingly privileged position—and the art system remains paralyzed
like a see-saw with only one side occupied.
Consequentially, I do not think that the seeming loss of art’s relevance can be
blamed upon the increasing dominance of the art market alone, but that this domi-
nance is instead another effect of the art world’s fixation on the artist as the excep-
tional subject of society. Reducing recognition to a dog-eat-dog-competition for
visibility, we either over-achieve the capitalist mandate ourselves—in rivalry with the
artist—or delegate the burden of jouissance to him/her and thereby postpone the
essential question of meaning, or the sense of what we are doing, into an ever-
more-distant future (which is, of course, also in line with capitalism).
This difficulty is by no means a new one, seeing as the demand to call into
question one’s own “ideas about reality and [man’s] poetic place in reality” was
already formulated, amongst many others, by the French author Antonin Artaud in
the early 1930s. As one of the most vehement critics of the modern cultural institu-
tion, he drafted several manifesto-style texts on a “theater of cruelty”4 to confront
the spectators with the performing arts’ deadening conventions and to force them
to assume a self-aware position towards culture and themselves.
“Cruel” in Artaud’s sense is a physical attack on the viewer, which deprives him/her
of his/her expertise and exposes him/her to his/her own lack of inquisitiveness.
Art’s task, as Jacques Derrida analyses on the occasion of a presentation of
Artaud’s paintings and drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,5 is to
perpetrate a blow on the spectator. In his lecture, Derrida transfers Artaud’s ideas
on theater to the museum and questions its function today, taking into account the
role of the artist and the artwork, as well as of exhibition organizers and the audi-
ence, and subsequently developing ideas for a new understanding of the museum’s
place in society, according to Artaud.
Following Artaud, I consciously disappointed the expectations on my pro-

gramming at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin – only to wholly fulfil
them in a successive step: in 2013, I opened with a Relaunch of the institution—which
was both the project’s title and its programme—before the first “proper” exhibition,
which was a solo show by the Berlin-based, French-Algerian artist Kader Attia that
opened a month later.
Relaunch consisted of a number of interventions, which all called into ques-

tion unconscious automatisms in the art world: The first act was to empty out the
entire building and to present KW as a framework, which has been determined by a

particular history and general expectations, channelled through the political, social,
and cultural contexts within which it positions itself—but which is also theoretically
free to be imagined anew at any given moment. This idea was implemented
through the specifically commissioned project Markierung by the Bulgarian artist
Nedko Solakov, who inscribed stories about the past of the building and the institu-
tion, about real projects to happen soon and my fantasies and plans for the future,
as well as his own observations, onto the institution’s empty walls. Markierung was
conceived as a collaboration between an artist and a curator: while walking through
the building, I told him everything that came to my mind or that I thought was
important for people to know, and Nedko transformed it into the same form of
scribbling he usually makes for his own works. Additionally, he took the freedom to
comment on our conversations and made them partially public, so that we became
visible as individuals negotiating our interests—and as a by-product, showed that
there is nothing natural about how any exhibition appears, since any display / exhi-
bition architecture responds to an implicit set of conventions and rules that differ
widely across periods and contexts.
Another part of Relaunch introduced so-called Teasers, which referenced

future projects without being artworks in themselves. The twenty Teasers presented
different ideas or exhibitions, some of which have already happened by now, others
which were abandoned at some point along the way. The idea here was to use
them—like Nedko’s markings—as moments of irritation, confronting the usual art-
goer’s unconscious anticipation to see the newest contemporary art and at the
same time gain reconfirmation as a connoisseur who recognizes a great deal of
those works. Likewise, the teasers functioned as ice-breakers that resonated with
non-professional visitors who might not immediately understand the codes of
contemporary art, and through them they had the opportunity to learn something
about this partially secret language…
One of the teasers, for example, was a model of a fruit fly, two meters wide,
which is part of the collection of the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden. The
future plan at the time was to collaborate with the museum and present objects
from their industrial and educational collection, set in contrast to contemporary
artworks, in order to unsettle each type of the objects’ status in relation to each
other. Unfortunately, and for different reasons, this project could not be realized
and was abandoned, at least for the time being.
Another teaser announced the show Real Emotions. Thinking in Film (co-
curated with Franz Rodenkirchen and Daniel Tyradellis, 2014), which dealt with
cinema’s potential to create emotions and originate new images of the world: we
asked twenty different people to describe one scene from the iconic film Vampyr by
Carl Theodor Dreyer (1932) in just a few lines. The written descriptions were pre-
sented on stands in front of a loop of that very scene, and showed in a very simple
way that film not only intentionally constructs our emotions, but also uses them to
open our minds to new experiences.
The most far-reaching project within Relaunch, however, was the Avatar. The
avatar, aka Sabine Reinfeld and Ulf Aminde, accompanied the entire process of
re-positioning and introducing my plans for KW and the institutional interests I
wanted to pursue. The idea of this project goes back to an informal conversation
between Ulf and myself, in which we discussed strategies for creating a self-reflex-
ive, but not self-contained, moment in each of our practices to understand the
restraints we were working with on a daily basis, without even being aware of them,
and how to make these accessible to the audience. An avatar seemed to be a playful

and timely tool in which to blend artistic and curatorial strategies and to place
authorship somewhere in between the two, in order to uncover our respective
desires for recognition (amongst other things), on the one hand, and the often
implicit and unconscious expectations of our colleagues and the audiences on the
other.
Our objective was to move beyond the self-referentiality of the system in

which we are working and to strive for a kind of art that we – the artists, the cura-
tors, and the institutions as responsible stakeholders – consider relevant today.
Within the long-term collaboration Insistere, Aminde recruited Reinfeld and
together they created the project Don’t Fuck with my Name. Hacking the Curator,
introducing my alter ego Ellen Bluumenstein (spelled with a double “u”) as a real
person and as an online presence parallel to my own emergence as a “public figure”.
The intervention started at the press conference of Relaunch. While I presented my
program and future plans to the attending press, the Avatar held court downstairs
in the yard and in the exhibition spaces and greeted regular audiences and passers-
by. We had agreed on not being at the same place at once, so during the opening
later we were both present but tried to stay on different floors. In her public
appearances, which were sometimes coordinated with the artistic office or with
me, but sometimes not—Ellen Bluumenstein first focused on representing or inter-
preting the public figure of a curator by visualizing and commenting on both her/
my professional self-image and the public’s projections onto her, and also opened
her own website and Facebook account. A few months later, she also translated a
curatorial speech into a spoken word performance. A participant of this perfor-
mance commented on Facebook: “Even more intriguing for me is the fact that it is
unclear, if the letter from Ellen Bluumenstein addresses the real Ellen Blumenstein,
or if it is written to herself as the Avatar, just as it is unknown whether or not the
real Ellen Blumenstein has read this post and is indeed reflecting on her position as
chief curator.” Of course, it is not clear either whether any of the content of this
speech was ever said by me or if the artists completely made it up—or whether it is
a mixture of both. The avatar therefore marks the intersection point of curatorial
and artistic imagination, expectations, and concerns. Apparently, I can only reflect
on my own perspective—if the artists would reflect on this project instead, their
contribution would likely not adopt a textual format.
This essay intends to make the ambivalent character of the project fruitful by
addressing both positions: I will track my current fantasies of what I would have
done had I been the artist conceiving of the Avatar Ellen Bluumenstein, and I will
imagine what could have been the maximum consistent outcome of the project
from a curatorial perspective.
My first immediate fantasy when revisiting the video documentation of my

double’s performance in preparation for this text was: I wish we curators would all
perform our public appearances in a more artistic sense and turn our speech acts
into reasons to develop coherent formats more than we currently do. Needless to
say that the occasions on which we are obliged to speak are so numerous, that it
appears absolutely unrealistic to put in the same effort as into a proper perfor-
mance piece. (Again, this argument resonates both ways: maybe curators should
not only notice the fact that our input often lacks depth, but also take appropriate
action? And, we may assume that it is not only us who are overworked, so that a
bad performance may either just be the result of too little time, or a good one
shows that the artist prioritizes differently…).

In any case, I found the idea that the Avatar could literally double the pres-
ence of the chief curator very tempting, and that she could therefore not only
reduce my work load and split the public attention between us, but also make
visible the curatorial persona as an institutional agent, which is not identical with
the individual taking that position. The curator inevitably acts as a symptom of an
institution, representing what the organization wants from the inside, but is also
addressed from the outside as the one who is able to fulfil any kind of wish or
demand. Thus she is like a doorkeeper who makes sure the house is open and
accessible, but also controls who comes in and which role is assigned to each per-
son. I very much liked the image that Insistere gave to this function, namely the
woman in a black frock literally greeting visitors at the entrance. She was standing
at the entrance door in a black coat, shook hands with people very seriously, pre-
tending that she could close the door at any time and keep somebody out or lock
someone else inside. At the opening reception, the Avatar over-affirmed my repre-
sentative duties and glamorously bathed in the masses – joyfully shaking her hair
over and over again in front of the people watching her.
As embarrassing as both the guests and myself found this appearance, it was
just as telling to consider my own ambivalence about being proud of my program
on the one hand, and anxious of being rejected and overwhelmed with the atten-
tion both of us were getting on the other. Why not admit to enjoying these
moments of recognition? The larger part of curatorial work is less gratifying, in
fact.
Other interventions remained partially invisible to the external viewer, but video
and photo documentation was presented online. The Avatar gave guided tours of
the exhibition and showed people around the building, staged an argument with
one of the guards and posed at my desk in the artistic office in a Zombie-like outfit.
It very quickly became apparent in the process that any space that I did not
have control over personally was not accessible to the Avatar. I had fantasized, for
example, that she would host events, write my press releases, give public interviews
or take over strategic or fundraising appointments for me. Not only had I wished to
share the burden of this time-consuming labour, but I was also curious to see how
the audience, press, politicians, administrators, or funders would have reacted
when confronted with a doppelganger of myself, having to decide if they should
actually address this individual in front of them as a curator or as an artist, as me or
as Sabine Reinfeld, or maybe even as Ulf Aminde. Expectedly, none of those institu-
tions were open to the experiment, and at this early stage of my employment I
could not handle the confrontation either—and did not dare to. Even leading an
internal team meeting proved to be impossible, as my colleagues outside of the
artistic office rejected the Avatar’s interference into our daily routine. One of the
funniest incidents thus occurred at the Venice Biennial of that year, when Ellen
Bluumenstein posted on Facebook that she had missed her flight. I was not
informed about her activities and rarely use social media for private purposes, so I
was more than surprised when my colleagues were startled to see me in town—the
story became the running gag of the opening weekend.
The final presentation of Don’t Fuck with my Name. Hacking the Curator was
staged as a participatory performance lecture in which each visitor co-acted as
KW’s curator, so there were many Avatars. The event turned out to be disastrous,
from Ulf’s perspective, because the audience immediately started questioning what
he was doing—something that is very rare in artistic performance today, because
the general art audience has become accustomed to artists’ provocations over the
last four decades of performance art. Hardly any professional attendee would be
offended today, because s/he knows s/he is part of an artwork and would feel

narrow-minded if s/he didn’t comply with the ideas of the artist who is considered
the beholder of truth, knowledge and/or innovation. I thus claim that Ulf made
himself consciously vulnerable—a strategy he frequently applies in his work—by
blurring the boundaries between an artistic and a curatorial position, and that the
audience unconsciously reacted to that fact.
Apart from it being stressful and uncomfortable for Ulf, as well as for me,
who was partially being addressed through the critique of him or of the project, the
evening was a success from my point of view in the sense that the positions of
artist, curator, and audience were visibly shifting during that night. If there was any
problem in the arrangement of the evening, it was that we had failed to anticipate
the aggression produced by this loss of a clear role.
While the subjects of today’s art prefer to challenge established structures

or hegemonic discourses, the experience with the Avatar shows how difficult it is to
confront one’s own convictions, routine, or habits or even to let go of them. It is
very easy to comply with the curatorial role—even if it is sometimes exhausting or
nerve-wracking: We make the discourse, we define who partakes in it and who
does not, and we also form careers; many times, our own careers are connected to
how well we accommodate the expectations of the system in which we act. The-
matic curating is increasingly reduced to the context of biennials, where our left,
ecological, feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, political, and so on positions are asserted
in vague concepts including a safe-guarding reference to a philosopher, some
name-dropping of well respected artists, and a somehow intuitive arrangement of
single works each visibly matching the topic. We, as art world practitioners, share
the same conduct, which we consider truer than that of any other approach. But
this attitude tends not only to bore the audience (and ourselves, if we dare to admit
it), but also to stop at merely reassuring our own position—other than that, it frus-
trates everyone.
As diverse as curatorial activity is today, the core expertise is still in exhibi-

tion making, since exhibitions are public interfaces theoretically open to anyone
and thus extended beyond the reach of internal or professional debate. Exhibitions
are ways to bring an argument into space, which means that someone claims
authorship—along with the possibility of being criticized for it.
Therefore, the insertion of an Avatar into a curatorial routine certainly has to
take on the challenge of actually organizing a show as a curator, not as an artist.
This distinction in positioning is crucial, since what the artist gains from a curatorial
perspective is the potential of being evaluated for his or her proposition. What s/he
reversely makes visible is the assumption that valuable content can actually be
produced not only by a single artwork, but also by a constellation of objects of any
kind in space.
For more information on the Avatar, check:
http://ellenbluumenstein.de
https://www.facebook.com/ellen.bluumenstein?fref=ts
https://vimeo.com/86791983

Ellen Blumenstein has been chief curator of KW Institute for contemporary art,
Berlin since January 2013. In her first year, she realized the exhibitions “Relaunch”, “Kader
Attia: Repair. 5 Acts” and “Real Emotions: Thinking in Film”, as well as launching compre-
hensive public programs and professional partnerships. In her second year she premiered the
first solo exhibitions in Germany of artists Ryan Trecartin, Kate Cooper, Channa Horwitz
and Elin Hansdottir. Before KW, she was an independent curator, member of the curatorial
collective THE OFFICE and founder of the project space Salon Populaire. Between 1998-
2005 she worked as a curator for KW Institute for Contemporary Art, where she realized
the exhibition project “Regarding Terror: The RAF-Exhibition” (with Klaus Biesenbach, Felix
Ensslin, 2005). Since, she curated the exhibition “Between Two Deaths” at ZKM in
Karlsruhe (with Felix Ensslin, 2007), and in 2011 she curated the Icelandic Pavilion at the
Venice Biennial (Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson).
Notes
1 Antonin Artaud, Das Theater und sein Double Fischer Verlag, S. 13. /
English Version, p. 10, 1958 Grove Press edition, trans. Mary Caroline Richards
2 Jacques Derrida: Artaud Moma Passagen Verlag S. 63.
3 Compare, for example, Reinhard Hoeps, „Gott ist nicht die Lösung, Gott
ist das Problem“, IN: Religion, Magazin der Kulturstiftung des Bundes #24, Früh-
ling/Sommer 2015, S. 17-18.
4 dt. Antonin Artaud: Das Theater und sein Double, Frankfurt am Main,
1969.
5 Jacques Derrida: Artaud Moma, Passagen Verlag, Vienna, 1996.

3 4
1,2,3 Relaunch 28.4.–25.8.2013, Insistere #7, 4 Relaunch 28.4.–25.8.2013, Insistere #7, Don´t
Don´t fuck with my name (Hacking the Curator), Series of fuck with my name (Hacking the Curator), Series of
Performances © Sabine Reinfeld/Ulf Aminde Performances, Foto: Petrov Ahner © Sabine Reinfeld/
Ulf Aminde

Thinking about Curatorial Education Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research
Thinking About
Curatorial Education
by Dorothee Richter
Undoubtedly CURATING is a new discursive formation, as defined by Michel
Foucault, which has rapidly developed since the 1970s. We are aware that we are
also part of this instituting process, with the developing of an Archive, with the
Postgraduate Programme in Curating at ZHdK, and with the PhD platform, a coop-
eration between the University of Reading and our publications. This formation is
instituted in hierarchical formations and power relations. Therefore we strive to
open up processes, to question what instituting and de-instituting means, and to
make our thoughts, struggles, and research accessible. As in all forms of cultural
production, content and form are interrelated (but not the same), and it matters, as
an ideological production, what one does, what one brings into existence. To mirror
our approach of teaching as practice with its impact of curatorial projects and
possibilities, this article discusses a specific “pedagogical” attitude which is funda-
mental for the programme. I try to show how this works as a practice that is
intensely informed by theory which influences and reflects actual projects and
attitudes. So curatorial knowledge production, which means in my understanding a
complex offering of visual, spatial, theoretical, context-related and historically
situated meaning production, is therefore based on concepts of theory as a prac-
tice—a deeply politically motivated construct. In this article I try to formulate this
based on the example of Gasthaus zum Bären / Museum Bärengasse in Zurich—one
of our curatorial experiments.
When I was asked to deliver a concept for Museum Baerengasse / Gasthaus

zum Baeren, I saw the opportunity to work in a very experimental way with stu-
dents of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating in conjunction with the web-
journal www.on-curating.org. As we later found out, we also manoeuvred ourselves
into a trap in the sense that the university did not see any means of funding this
undertaking, and on the other hand we were practically banned from all other
funding bodies precisely because we are a part of the university, a dilemma that
stayed with us. For extremely experimental endeavours of the kind we developed
into, there simply are no funding bodies.
On the other hand we were very grateful for the wonderful space, despite
this drawback, we were quite sure that the endeavour could create something new,
something important for the Zurich scene, challenging for students, and also
important for an international outreach. The drive, the urgency I felt was related to
what Jacques Derrida once formulated for a “university without conditions”, a
model he positioned against contemporary universities that work hand in hand
with industries, be it in connection with technical innovations or, I take the liberty
to add, anything that might be called creative industries. Derrida demands: “Conse-
quence of this thesis: such an unconditional resistance could oppose the university
to a great number of powers, for example to state powers (and thus to the power
of the nation-state and to its phantasm of indivisible sovereignty, which indicates
how the university might be in advance not just cosmopolitan, but universal,

extending
t beyond worldwide citizenship and the nation-state in general), to eco-
nomic powers (to cooperations and to national and international capital), to the
powers of the media, ideological, religious, and cultural powers, and so forth – in
short, to all the powers that limit democracy to come.”1
A “democracy to come” is a promising horizon for any programme. To

explain the concept, I would like to lay out different trajectories: on the one hand a
short description of the formats I had in mind, and on the other hand a reflection
on pedagogical elements as understood from the perspective of the theory on
ideological state apparatuses developed by Louis Althusser, which in my under-
standing could be re-interpreted in a differentiated way with Lacanian concepts of
the screen/tableau. Both of these trajectories are intrinsically intertwined with a
specific attitude in actual encounters. This attitude can be seen in the light of Derri-
da’s demand for a “university without conditions”, which also demands a very spe-
cific attitude on the part of the professor. For Derrida the word ‘profess’, with its
Latin origin, means to declare openly, to declare publicly: “The declaration of the
one who professes is a performative declaration in some way. It pledges like an act
of sworn faith, an oath, a testimony, a manifestation, an attestation, or a promise, a
commitment. To profess is to make a pledge while committing to one’s responsibil-
ity. To make profession is to declare out loud what one is, what one believes, what
one wants to be, while asking another to take one’s word and believe this declara-
tion.”2 In this sense I wanted to make my own deep interest in arts and democracy
become part of the undertakings at Museum Baerengasse / Gasthaus zum Baeren,
but also my deep interest in the potentials of all students as a group, and of each
student as an individual entity with his or her knowledge, history, and abilities.
In my own curatorial projects I have long been interested in experimenting

with new formats, formats that exhibit a strange tendency to shift from being an
office to being a studio, an exhibition space, a project space, a gathering space or a
bar. The modern basement of Museum Baerengasse / Gasthaus zum Baeren, with
its relatively large spaces, could be used as a walk-in cinema where short films
would be shown in a loop, so visitors could just drop in for a while and leave again.
It would also work as a dance floor, as we later discovered. But to explain this, I
must introduce the situation at Museum Baerengasse / Gasthaus zum Baeren.
When we moved in, it was a strange postmodern building which actually consisted
of two buildings that had been moved there from across the street, a distance of
about seventy metres. The two medieval buildings were moved because the UBS
had undertaken to erect a huge administrative ensemble. They were placed side by
side and connected with a modern staircase and a lift—a strange conglomerate of
modern and old spaces, or, in short: absolutely postmodern. So the rooms were
actually relatively small and also had an intense language of their own, with wood,
and with mouldings on the ceiling. There were also huge old ovens still installed in
it, left over from a time when the building served as a museum of medieval living
conditions, a branch of the Landesmuseum. Not at all a white cube—and, it must be
confessed, extremely difficult to work with from a curatorial perspective.
The rooms were narrow and also often too small for our growing public,
when we had discussions, talks, or screenings. Before we used the space, the
Museum Baerengasse had presented contemporary art exhibitions, and for about
two years it has also hosted the Kunsthalle Zurich.
So some of the features of the space did bring with them typical exclusion
scenarios of a museum, which invites mainly the white middle class, but without the
typical interpellation of a subject that is in a central perspective overview situation

and also always on display, which, as Tony Bennett has argued in detail, creates a
subject that installs the perspective of being seen inside and develops all the habit-
ual self-control of a bourgeois citizen.3 Actually, the Museum Baerengasse’s spaces
had a tendency to hide people; one always had difficulties meeting in the labyrin-
thine spaces. But the exclusion was a precondition, to which were added, in our
case, the preconditions of a university setting (which is unquestionably another
scenario of exclusion).
To explain the specific pedagogical understanding that informs our pro-

gramme, I have always thought that notions of radical democratic pedagogy are
interesting and in many ways valuable. Here I refer to Mary Drinkwater’s discerning
research on pedagogical approaches to which I can relate because I have my back-
ground in an academy that offers a wide range of courses in humanistic psychology
and political science. Drinkwater based her research on radical educational policy
argumentation on John Dewey and Paolo Freire, and she is moreover interested in
the agency that could be achieved in a political sense.4 She explains what radical
educational policy could be and what methods should be used: “Traditional,
rational or managerial policy development approaches are generally linear, staged
and state controlled or state centred. A radical policy approach, in contrast, recog-
nizes both the complexity and the value of having a broad and diverse group of
stakeholders or policy actors acting at many different levels. The use of the meta-
phor of a policy web (Goldberg, 2006; Joshee, 2008) helps to understand how the
policy process is shaped by circulating discourses. Using this metaphor, policy is
designed as an ensemble of multiple discourses that interact in a complex web of
relationships that enablesw or constrains social relations. It is a fluid arrangement of
discourses existing at a given moment in time, emerging out of the struggle
between multiple discourses from multiple voices in a given context.”5 For the
Postgraduate Programme in Curating, the idea of a complex and diverse group
corresponded first of all to the actual students’ group, because the students are
already working in different fields of art and culture. The programme resides in the
department of further education, which means that we have gallerists, a film festi-
val director, a performance festival director, a literature festival director, people
who work in art institutions as producers or in art education, and sometimes stu-
dents with a background in film and often in art history, art and design. We have
also students with extremely different cultural backgrounds: about one third are
Swiss, but the rest come from Italy, France, Austria, Cuba, Brazil, Canada, the US,
the UK, Romania, Serbia, South Africa, Lebanon and Israel. On a second level, the
students should be able to apply the idea of diverse groups of stakeholders to the
actual working situation of the curator. A curator is always involved in negotiations
with artists, production groups and stakeholders in the arts, cultural policy, and the
broader society. So the actual formulation of a position in the programme should
later be transferrable to other challenges. For the programme and our situation in
the Museum Baerengasse / Gasthaus zum Baeren, it is important to keep in mind
the “metaphor of a policy web” and, as Drinkwater claims, “Using this metaphor,
policy is designed as an ensemble of multiple discourses that interact in a complex
web of relationships that enables or constrains social relations.”6
The concept of a fluid arrangement of discourses existing at a given moment

in time appeals to me as a way of sketching our situation as a programme in the
Museum Baerengasse. It takes into consideration that ideas and inputs of students
as well as of myself and other lecturers in the programme formulated the events
we developed. On the other hand, the actual power structures are not ignored. For
this reason, for the multiplicity of inputs in the form of screenings, talks and exhibi-
tions, some of the projects were developed on the basis of concepts presented by

myself and other lecturers, sometimes developed for participating students, and
others were developed by students (see the names in each project description in
our publication in the on-curating book section) and the programme assistant,
Mirjam Bayerdörfer. Different stages of professionalization and specific knowledge
were thus clearly reflected in the programme. Given the diverse backgrounds and
working experiences of the participants, this does not imply a hierarchy of profes-
sionalization with lecturers at the top, assistants in the middle, and students at the
bottom, but that a multiplicity of abilities and professional qualifications were at
stake: there were a lot of people with very different skills and experience involved,
whether in exhibition production, short film, working with young students, collect-
ing, programming music events, programming performance, philosophy, etc. In any
case, the different sets of knowledge were something I accepted wholeheartedly
because I believe that a university setting must allow experiments, failures, fissures,
even confusion, and should provide a setting for long-term engagement and pro-
ject work, and that the latter should emerge out of the struggle between multiple
discourses from multiple voices in a given context. So my goal was not to have a
perfect programme, but to have an imperfect platform for experiments, but with a
specific direction. Taking into consideration that a space such as a university is
structured hierarchically, quite in keeping with Johan Galtung’s concept of “struc-
tural violence”, a multiplicity of concepts of subjectivity and creativity were at stake
and acknowledged.7
To return to the concept of ideological state apparatuses: Louis Althusser

argues that every cultural production situates and, in a sense, produces a subject
through interpellations.8 As some may recall, we made this claim also for the sub-
ject of an exhibition, which is also the addressee of interpellations—the subject is, in
a sense, produced by the exhibition, as Wolfgang Kemp diagnosed for some paint-
ings in the space of the political.9 Some contemporary theoreticians consider the
notion of interpellation too reductionist. Especially cultural studies have taken into
consideration the possibilities of accepting a proposed ideological layout, refusing it
or challenging it. However, I think this may work on a much deeper level of address
and intersubjectivity. Jacques Lacan developed the metaphor of a screen or tableau
on which a subject projects multiple “answers” or reactions to the interpellations
reaching it from the outside. In the Lacanian conception, a subject is on the one
hand already spoken, which means it is placed in a signifying or symbolic chain. A
subject is inscribed into this line of descendance before its birth and after its death,
and this unconsciously influences its development and positioning.10 In this sense a
subject is not at all autonomous.
The ideal of an autonomous subjectivity is based on an illusion, which is

developed during the mirror stage. In the mirror stage an imaginary whole subject
is constructed, but this subjectivity must be acknowledged from the outside. The
small child sees itself as a whole image and reacts jubilantly. For Lacan this is the
fundamental structure of subjectivity, which is obviously based on a misconception,
because the moment of validation is eluded as well as the actual extreme depend-
ency on other human beings. This is the basis of the imaginary register. To see
oneself as the central point of central perspective is illusionary in the sense that
that the other—or, more specifically, an imagined perspective of the other—is
sketched by Lacan as another triangle, reversing and overlapping the imaginary
triangle of the central perspective. In this construction the subject starts to project
itself onto the imagined position in favour of the person who sees the subject. It
multiplies different projections of its image (illusionary subjectivity) onto this
screen/tableau. To connect this scheme to the more rigid model of Althusser, a
subject permanently projects its own subjectivity in relation to an imagined other

onto a tableau, where it is seen by the other. In this model, subjectivity is produced
in an ongoing process of interpellations and projections, and is in no way fixed and
in no way autonomous. This is also why a teacher–student relationship is extremely
important, taking into consideration the power relationship Althusser implied in his
example of someone being addressed by a policeman.
From my perspective, the fact that the actual hierarchy of the teacher-stu-
dent relationship permits a moment of equality and acknowledgement in the event
of interaction is highly contradictory.11 Jacques Rancière defines equality as being in
fundamental opposition to the police order, the limiting power structure of a soci-
ety. The police order is unable to “respond to the moment of equality of speaking
bodies.”12 For Rancière, equality is produced in a process, in an open set of prac-
tices. He thus draws two conclusions: “First, equality is not a state, not a goal that
an action may seek to achieve. It is a premise that an action sets out to verify. Sec-
ond, this set of practices has no particular name. Equality has no visibility of its
own. Its premise must be understood in the practices that articulate it, and extri-
cated from its implicitness.”13
Rancière’s important deliberations on the ignorant schoolmaster argue in

favour of equal intelligence as a precondition for education.14 Nevertheless, already
the term “schoolmaster” alone implies a hierarchy. In these processes the contra-
diction is preconditioned. So from my perspective a teacher has to be aware of his
or her responsibility; she or he should sense the need to become acquainted with
the specific subjective entity, the cultural backgrounds, the skills and abilities, the
trajectories and goals of each student. As described by Derrida, a teacher has to do
this on the basis of his or her own positioning and own sense of its urgent necessity.
What is more, a teacher has to risk an uncontrollable moment of encounter, an
encounter in which equality in the sense of being equally valuable is the precondi-
tion. This moment could be described as re-cognition, which I strongly believe
holds the potential for change. At the same time, curating (and other forms of
cultural production) offers the potential to transform an urgency or, in the Lacan-
ian sense, the wish for the “object petit a”, which is best described as a lack, a want-
ing, a longing. To transfer this longing into some sort of a signifying chain would be
what could happen through the “talking cure” as well as by producing culture and
art. Naturally, different sign systems as language or art offer different possibilities
and trajectories. I hope this short excursus is not understood in a reductive way.
I would like to continue by discussing the promising and inspiring talk enti-
tled “The Subject of Curating”, given by Felix Ensslin at the symposium Curating:
Glittering Myth, Revolutionary Force, Social Symptom?, in which he set forth in detail
pre-figurative structures of curatorial practice and, more specifically, of curating in
the university context.15 The notion “subject” is associated in English on the one
hand with subjectivity, and on the other hand with the notion of a specific topic.
Thus the word “subject” in Ensslin’s title is left to shift ambiguously back and forth.
We are left to consider the influence a subject has on a subject in both directions,
without falling into the trap of an actor-network theory, which projects the capac-
ity to act onto things.
In Ensslin’s concept, all empirical tools of curating as specific activities—

installing exhibitions, art-historical knowledge, institutional management, organiza-
tion of networks, connoisseurship, tools of mediation, judging, fundraising and so
on—i.e., all the activities with which curating is usually associated, are considered
something that comes along with the job. A show is produced because you feel the

urgency to make something materialize, to put something on view, to implement a

discourse (as a subject, not as a “thing”).
The art academy of the present is based on different models which are all to
an extent also present in the contemporary situtation. To quote Therry de Duve,
these models could be categorized as the academy model, the Bauhaus model and
the contemporary model.16 All of them have different preconceptions of the sub-
ject and of creativity. Very briefly, the academy upholds the idea of the artist as a
genius who is supposed to be an inspiration for his students; they are supposed to
follow his example and learn his techniques through imitation. The students are
organized as a group of followers, but they can also compete, initially for his recog-
nition and later for public recognition; on the other hand, the alumni of this specific
group would also later on promote each other. (The gender aspect is very clear and
does not require further discussion here). The concept of the Bauhaus, which was
the leading model only very briefly between the two world wars but still has a lot of
influence today, changed the ideology of the genius at work. The new ideology was
that of creativity and of intensive work based on industrial production and an
interest in new materials. The idea was of a twofold education combining aspects
of art and aspects of engineering. In many respects this concept bore resemblance
to industrial production and to an intense ideology of work.
The concept referred to by Bailey17 as contemporary is based on the idea of

developing an attitude, which makes it necessary to engage in reading and discuss-
ing viewpoints. This practice is based on working together and not on developing
singular authorship, and in this context to deconstruct means to question many
existing paradigms and formats. What is also important here is the necessity of
developing an idea about one’s own situation, one’s own position, as part of a
specific situation at the university, in the arts, and in society as a whole. Students
should come out of their training self-empowered; thus the teachers can do no
more than serve as examples; they cannot prescribe courses of action or give
orders. Our exhibition projects could be assigned to this category. Is it (Y)ours?,
curated by Damian Jurt and myself, asks who owns the public space and extends
this question to a multitude of different contexts, pointing out similarities and
differences. “Who owns the public space? How can we formulate in it claims and
contradictions? How do alternative utopias develop? And how to transform com-
munities, strategic alliances and movements? How do artists formulate claims to
participation? And how do artists intervene in Cape Town, Hong Kong, Bern,
Zurich, Berlin, Cairo?”
For the exhibition we collaborated with Christian Falsnaes to produce a video

on site at the Museum Baerengasse. In the first part we acted with him as a choir to
a strange musical, and in the second part we interacted in a performance in which
we cut all of his clothes off his body while talking about art, re-enactment, gender,
and vulnerability. The second shared exhibition Unsettling the Setting. Playing, Plying,
Squatting // Operating, Owning, Occupying ––– or rather? was curated by Mirjam
Bayerdörfer and myself. We asked artists, theorists, and curators to provide a con-
cept for our somehow uncanny situation at Gasthaus zum Baeren / Museum Bae-
rengasse. “Around the Paradeplatz in Zurich, money does not grow on trees but
instead is buried in the ground. What for? What does it do there? The Museum
Bärengasse is located 200 m from Paradeplatz. For whom? What does it do there?”
to quote parts of the concept. Our aim was to explore the situation of our project
at that location, and we understood this as a starting point for discussions with the
students and the public. The last shared project, Involvement Requires Perception,
invited eleven artist-run spaces to present one work (which could also be a social

sculpture) and one manifesto each. Here, two students worked with each art space.
This project handed over the actual curatorial tasks and negotiations to the stu-
dents, and as a result was extremely productive. It showed very divergent
approaches to art and social space, and provided a scope for negotiations and dis-
cussions. These three programmatic exhibitions can be understood as the back-
bone of the project, a form of self-reflection and a means of asking questions about
the social, architectural, and political situation and how to deal with it. Within this
context we provided space and opportunities (although very little money) to realize
projects with or without advice. The loose framework for the projects was “Curate
Your Context”, the request to think about your context and to initiate a pro-
gramme that would reflect aspects of specific contexts. As you can see from the
intense and diverse programme, students of all backgrounds took advantage of the
opportunity and realized shows, performances, discussions, music, book launches,
etc. The programme was moreover accompanied by a series of talks reflecting on
curating and cultural practices.
I am convinced that today one has also to take into consideration all aspects
of digitalization, which works as an acceleration tool and as a public space. This is
why we have the webjournal www.on-curating.org as a partner for the programme
on some issues. Derrida describes this aspect as follows: “One of the mutations
that affect the place and nature of university travail is today a certain delocalizing
virtualization of space of communication, discussion, publication, archivization. It is
not the virtualization that is absolutely novel in its structure, for as soon as there is
a trace, there is also some virtualization; it is the ‘abc’ of deconstruction. What is
new, quantitatively, is the acceleration of the rhythm, the extent and powers of cap-
italization of such virtuality. Hence the necessity to rethink the concepts of the
possible and the impossible. This new technical ‘stage’ of virtualization (computeri-
zation, digitalization, virtually immediate worldwide-ization of readability, tele-
work, and so forth) destabilizes, as we well know, the university habitat. It upsets
the university’s topology, disturbs everything that organizes the places defining it,
namely, the territory of its fields and its disciplinary frontiers as well as its places of
discussion, its field of battle, its Kampfplatz, its theoretical battlefield – and the
communitary structure of its ‘campus’.”18 We are interested in this new topology of
the university, in knowledge production as a will to know changes. At this stage we
would like to make our endeavours and shared efforts available to a larger public, a
public space which is, as stated by Derrida, a field of competition, a struggle for
visibility, but on the other hand also a democratic tool, which opens up to people
from far away. As stated by Peter Weibel,19 the digital media change any notion of
distance. They also change our senses, our human condition as such. For us, the stu-
dents and lecturers of the programme, the webjournal www.on-curating.org holds
the promise to be not just a second-rate consumer of thoughts, but of producing
knowledge about curating alongside temporary projects in space. Again, this is
another opportunity of self-empowerment for students and alumni to materialize
their urgencies.
See all projects of Gasthaus zum Bären /Museum Bärengasse, publication

in the book section of OnCurating.org.
Dorothee Richter, curator, since 2005 head of the Postgraduate Programme in

Curating (MAS/CAS) www.curating.org at the University of the Arts Zurich ZHdK (Co-
founder and concept), she also co-founded with Susanne Clausen the “Research Platform for
Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Cultural Studies, Practice-Based Doctoral Programme” a
cooperation of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating and the Department of Fine Arts,

University of Reading. From 1999 to the end of 2003, Richter was artistic director of the
Künstlerhaus Bremen where she curated a discursive programme based on feminist issues,
urban situations, power relation issues, institutional critique. She worked as a curator ever
since. She co-curated numours symposia. She co-conceived and coordinated the research and
archiving project Curating Degree Zero (2003-2008) which explored critical and experimen-
tal approaches to exhibition making at the beginning of the millennium. PHD “Fluxus. Kunst
gleich Leben? Mythen um Autorschaft, Produktion, Geschlecht und Gemeinschaft”, pub-
lisher of www.on-curating.org which presents current approaches to critical curatorial
practice; In 2013 she finalised a film together with Ronald Kolb: „Flux Us Now! Fluxus
explored with a camera.“ 2014 -2015 artistic director of Gasthaus zum Baeren/ Museum
Baerengasse, Zurich . At the moment she is working with Ronald Kolb on a digital archive/
film on Curatorial practice, a cooperation project of ZKM Karlsruhe and ZHdK.
Notes Manoni’s pedagogical concepts, which she derived

1 Jacques Derrida, “The Future of the Profes- from Lancanian theory.
sion or the University without Condition (thanks to 12 Jacques Rancière, “Gibt es eine politische
the ‘Humanities’, What Could Take Place Tomor- Philosophie?”, in Badiou et al., eds., Politik der Wahr-
row),” in Tom Cohen, ed., Jacques Derrida and the heit (Vienna, 1997), pp. 64–93. Available online at
Humanities: A Critical Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge <http://www.episteme.de/htmls/Ranciere-
University Press, 2002), p. 26. politische-Philosophie.html> (accessed 6 November
2 Derrida 2002 (see note 1), pp. 31–32. 2011), p. 4.
3 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: 13 Ibid., p. 5.
History, Theory, Politics (London, New York: Routledge, 14 Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster:
1995) Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (original title Le
4 John Dewey, Experience & Education. Kappa Maître ignorant: Cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellec-
Delta Pi Lecture Series, 1938; Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of tuelle, published in 1987).
Freedom: Ethics, Democracy and Civic Courage (MA: 15 See as video the talk by Felix Ensslin, “The
Rowman & Littlefield, 1998); Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of Subject of Curating” at the symposium Curating:
the Oppressed (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1975); D. Glittering Myth, Revolutionary Force, Social Symptom?,
Fuller, K. Fitzgerald and J. S. Lee, “The Case of Multi- Zurich University of the Arts, 2014, http://www.
ple Measures”, Association for Supervision, Curriculum curating.org/index.php/talks/glittering-myths-felix-
Development, Winter, 2008 (52). ensslin (accessed March 2015).
5 Mary Drinkwater, “Radical Educational 16 Thierry de Duve, “When Form Has Become
Policy: Critical democratic pedagogy and the reinfu- Attitude – And Beyond,” in The Artist and the Academy:
sion of the arts in secondary schools, art and educa- Issues in Fine Art Education and the Wider Cultural
tion”, http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/ Context, ed. Stephen Foster and Nicholas de Ville
radical-educational-policy-critical-democratic-peda- (Southampton, UK: John Hansard Gallery, University
gogy-and-the-reinfusion-of-the-arts-in-secondary- of Southhampton, 1994), pp. 23-40.
schools/ (accessed 5 April 2015). 17 Stuart Bailey, ‘Towards a Critical Faculty’,
6 Drinkwater 2015 (see footnote 5). Dot Dot Dot, 2006 <, http://www.dextersinister.org/
7 Johan Galtung, Strukturelle Gewalt Beiträge MEDIA/PDF/criticalfaculty.pdf> (accessed 20 April
zur Friedens- und Konfliktforschung, (Berlin, Leipzig. 2015).
Rowohlt 1988). 18 Derrida 2002 (see note 1), p. 31.
8 Louis Althusser, Ideological State Apparatuses 19 Peter Weibel, Ortlosigkeit und Bilderfülle,
(London: Verso, 2008).1989, pp. 61–102. Talk at Felix Burda Memorial Lectures, Iconic Turn,
9 Dorothee Richter, Sigrid Schade, »Ausstel- 23rd Aug. 2012, starting at 46:05, https://www.
lungs-Display, Reflexionen zu einem Züricher youtube.com/watch?v=5lIpNADoqYM (accessed 20
Forschungsprojekt«, in Paolo Bianchi (Guest ed.), April 2015).
Kunstforum International, Das Neue Ausstellen, Bd.186
Juni-Juli 2007, Ruppichteroth 2007.
10 See Dylan Evans, Dictionary of Lacanian
Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1998), p.187.
11 I am not deeply familiar with Maude

1 5
2 6
3 7
Captions
1 Video Production with Christian Falsnaes
and students of the Postgraduate Programme
in Curating, for the exhibition Is it (Y)ours?
2 Exhibition view, Is it (Y)ours?, 13 March 2014
3,4 Exhibition view, Involvement Requires
Perception. 11 project spaces – 11 artworks – 11 ways,
6 March 2015
5,6,7 Exhibition view, Unsettling the Setting,
24 October 2014
4

Imprint Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research
Imprint
Issue 26
Publisher
Dorothee Richter, Barnaby Drabble
Co-Publisher
Michael Birchall
Editors
Dorothee Richter & Barnaby Drabble
Contributors
Felix Ensslin, Ellen Blumenstein, Brian Holmes,
Sabeth Buchmann, Sergio Edelzstein, Avi Feldman,
Elke Krasny, Dorothee Richter
Proofreading
Stephanie Carwin
Web Design and Graphic Design Concept

Ronald Kolb, Biotop 3000
Graphic Design Issue 26

Biotop 3000
Cover image
Curating Degree Zero Archive in Zagreb,
Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic
Supported By
Supported by the Postgraduate Programme
in Curating (www.curating.org)
Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts (ICS),

Department of Cultural Analysis
Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK),
and the Ecole cantonale d’art du Valais (ECAV).

ONCURATING.org is an independent international
journal (both web and print) focusing on questions
around curatorial practise and theory.
ONCURATING.org
Toni-Areal,
Pfingstweidstrasse 96,
8031 Zürich
[email protected]
www.on-curating.org
For advertising options please visit

our website and get in touch!
Supported by the Postgraduate Programme

in Curating (www.curating.org),
Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts (ICS),
Department of Cultural Analysis,
Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK),
the Ecole cantonale d’art du Valais (ECAV).

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ONCURATING.

Finally, the archive as a body of publications, folders, CDs, invitation cards,

The first issue related to the archive concentrates on curatorial research.

4 Issue 26 / September 2015

candidates from the PhD platform, a cooperation between the Postgraduate

We would like to discuss curating in relation to changes in image production,

Two of the contributions in this first publication are centred on examples of

Felix Ensslin developed his argumentation for our symposium Curating as a

5 Issue 26 / September 2015

In her contribution “Feminist Thought and Curating,” Elke Krasny addresses

In this publication on researching curating, we would also show how an

6 Issue 26 / September 2015

This is shown in two totally different examples. One project is discussed by

In the second project, an avatar of a curatorial subject reacts to cultural

Undoubtedly CURATING is a new discursive formation, as defined by Michel

7 Issue 26 / September 2015

Dorothee Richter, curator, since 2005 head of the Postgraduate Programme in

8 Issue 26 / September 2015

Zürcher Hochschule der Künste , Medien- und Informationszentrum MIZ,

9 Issue 26 / September 2015

Initiated by Barnaby Drabble and Dorothee Richter, the archive was

Plug-in (Basel), Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva, Künstlerhaus

10 Issue 26 / September 2015

The Archive consists of material gifted by the following curators, artist-cura-

Arts Initiative Tokyo, Rosanne Altstatt, Amasté, Artlab, Anthony

The following pages provide impressions of a selection of the venues to

11 Issue 26 / September 2015

Curating Degree Zero Archive in Basel

With generous support of:

Production: Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva

The organisers wish to particulary thank [plug.in]

12 Issue 26 / September 2015

Curating Degree Zero Archive in Bremen

Exhibition design: Elektrosmog, Barnaby Drabble,

With the additional program

13 Issue 26 / September 2015

Curating Degree Zero Archive in Lüneburg

Halle für Kunst

Installation designed an re-interpreted by

With the cooperation of the University Lüneburg

14 Issue 26 / September 2015

Curating Degree Zero Archive in London

Artlab at Imperial College, London

Discussion Event: 6th of May 2005

15 Issue 26 / September 2015

Curating Degree Zero Archive in Korea

Insa Art Space

Display and re-interpretation

Opening talk and discussion 4pm December 20th

16 Issue 26 / September 2015

Curating Degree Zero Archive in Croatia

Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic

Curators Ana Janeski and Ivana Mestrov invited

17 Issue 26 / September 2015

18 Issue 26 / September 2015

The Subject of Curating –

19 Issue 26 / September 2015

Again: Restarting with Post-structuralism

Material Networking and the Subject