Art and Feminism, papers from session at ARCO '02 Madrid, February 2002
If white is just a colour, the gallery is just a sight?
Ute Meta Bauer asked me to talk about the very specific approach to questions of gender and marginality in the exhibition projects that I have been organising and to focus on the necessity of connect gender debates to their context in various hegemonic settings, in order to introduce ideas about how collaborative practices can create new spaces of discourse. I would like to refer to a specific project which I initiated at Shedhalle Zurich at the end of the 1990s, in which the institutional framework, the “exhibition”, was made into a communicative space and integrated the audience/public as part of the setting. For, in highlighting the aspect of usage, these projects were going beyond linear speaking structures: ie a one way communication by the institution to its audiences. As each particular institutional setting is relevant in order to develop new forms of speech positions, I would like to give you a short introduction to the institutional frame, before I present and reflect on the project itself.
The Shedhalle Zurich – a contemporary art space – had become, due to its conceptual change in 1994 and the program of the first curatorial team Renate Lorenz and Sylvia Kafhesy, a space, for cultural political discourse on the one hand and newly politicised forms of exhibition practices. The projects organised in the Shedhalle have been and are still strongly issue-related, using post- structuralist and feminist theory, post-colonial and city sociology as the theoretical frameworks for the projects it initiaties. Specific to the exhibition program during the 1990s were projects like Game Grrrl, Natur TM, erotisch aber indiskret, Sex&Space, Kultur, MoneyNations and a lot of others which were developed collectively or in collaborative formations with other groups of people and the public. The curatorial team itself was constituted in the 1990s by two or, during my own time there, three curators and not as is more usual by a single curator. This created a collective notion of curatorship and deconstructed in some ways the master narration of the curator and his or her power and position in choosing, collecting and valuing work. Another important aspect is that in this first constellation of curators, Renate Lorenz (in that time part of the group), Büro Bert, Ursula Biemann, Sylvia Kafhesy and myself have all been artists and in a broader sense cultural producers. This created an atmosphere more like a producers' space, where projects have been on the one hand developed over a longer period together with the persons involved because of common interests in that specific issue, and on the other hand, the people involved in the projects have been not just artists, but in relation to this expanded context architects, gender theorists, political activists as well.
In Shedhalle Projects, the exhibition space has been used in a way which tried to change the body politics of the exhibition as well as its representational paradigms. First of all with regard to the audience in relation to the artist, the notion of a single cultural producer has been transgressed as well as the separation of the two was constantly put into question. The practice in Shedhalle during the 1990s tried to broaden the concept and understanding of exhibition practices, analysing the institutional framework as a hegemonic position: a position that has been the ground for works of artists of the second generation of Institutional Critique in the late 1980s and beginning of the 1990s. This was also the ground for my own reflections as an artist outside and as a curator inside an institution.
The image politics of the annual publications of Shedhalle 1994-1998, for example, represented the exhibition always in relation to the spectator and presented the public as actors/ participants within the exhibition. The publications used small black and white images and presented the spectators not as neutral objects in front of works but actively engaged in viewing, discussion and interactions in the space. It is not by chance that you do not see the spectator's back in front of the work in many of these images, (for as Brian O Doherty pointed out in his famous article ‘Inside the White Cube’, this is typical for the representation of the spectator in installation photographs), but instead what you see is, for example, the back of the artist Lia Perjovschi from Romania, as she explains her work to the audience at the MoneyNations opening in 1998, and we all become spectators of the photograph and the scene with which we are confronted.
In the publication Agenda: Perspektiven Kritischer Kunst, the artist Julie Ault (a member of Group Material) points out as well, that the practice of viewing an exhibition typically puts the viewer in a specific silenced and disciplined position. Referring to exhibition projects like Alt Youth Media at the New Museum (New York) in 1996, Julie Ault argues that this show, gave the public (in opposition to the art gallery in general) space and access to much more everyday life practices (the not so serious ones) in the exhibition hall: reading magazines, viewing videos, copying Fan-Zines, doing research, meeting with friends, and listening to music etc.
In most of the projects I organised or co-organised, the exhibition space became more like a workspace, a public studio for critical discourses, a space for political theory and interdisciplinary collaborations rather than a space for visual and textual representation and artistic works only, in the manner which Julie Ault describes. I tried to use the institution itself as a producer of content and inter-connectivity, as a social space as well as a space for critical issues. I would like to point to the project MoneyNations, in this context again, which has been a exhibition, workshop, congress, video program on the one hand but, much more importantly, a network of producers, a kind of supra-national community, between West- Middle- East- and South-European cultural producers from different disciplines on the other hand, who from a cultural perspective developed projects over the Schengen (visa) Border, by making the border itself to an issue (www.moneynations.ch ).
Similarly in the Sex&Space Project, in Zurich, which was later presented as part of the steirischer herbst festival in Graz , TV set-like situations were installed in the exhibition space alongside information material and videos, which obviously were to be used by the public and at the same time the artists as they chose. (Sex & Space website). These sets gave the impression that performances could take place, or film shots made, or that the space itself was a stage-like situation. The Props represented some general assumptions of space, like the division of public and private spaces, but as they were Props, they were de-naturalised and appeared at the same time in their status as “common sense”. However you would not have found any "finished" work in the exhibition hall in the manner which would be usual in an exhibition hall, or an information design exhibition. In fact, it seemed as if there was only a small amount of material around. Indeed, the show had even not enough information included, to say that this would have been a clear information-orientated or designed exhibition, a precise, where you would be guided along one line of argument to get into the debate. Everything you saw only suggested that there would be a potential of expression and analysis, that there are multiple references, actual, historical, and that the space did not fulfil its usual purpose: TO SHOW. To EXHIBIT knowledge.
This strategy needs to be understood in terms of its background in institutional critique, namely, that the exhibition - as a historical product as a stage of ordering knowledge and discourse – always has been and still is a place of inclusion and exclusion, and that every act of showing privileges knowledge, and constructs a certain history . In case of Sex&Space the concept of space itself had been an issue and therefore it became highly relevant that in the history of exhibition practices woman (producers) were structurally written out, or more accurately included only as the sexualised image or muse.
The idea for a productive space/environment of Sex&Space in Zurich came out of a long process and some group work, which I initiated when I started to work in Zurich . My "curatorial" decision for the Zurich project had been to change the roles of audience, by inviting them to take part. Artists from Berlin and Vienna like Josef Strau, Ariane Mueller, Lukas Duwenhoegger , Cornelia Schmidt Bleek, Michael Zinganel and Jochen Becker, were also invited to hold lectures or lecture performances, which addressed issues of deconstructing modernist planning paradigms on the grounds of their heterosexual normative implications. The invitation of artists to be theorists highlighted the context of an artistic practice, which uses theory as a practice in itself as well as for design and art production. My “politics” in these invitations tried to make transparent that the interest in theory, has been always part of artistic practices, but has often been left out of the representation of artistic production as a value in the exhibition space. Parallel to this I initiated, together with the art historian and gender theorist Rachel Mader, a reading group with younger not-yet-known artists and cultural producers, who mostly came from the School of Visual Arts in Geneva, like Pauline Boudry, Martine Anderfuhren, Lea Jaeklin, Susanne Sauter, and others. This process, in itself, made the exhibition in the end into a much needed space for production, instead of a more traditional show with finished works. But that was not just a curatorial decision. The group of women involved decided it mainly together and stayed almost every day in the exhibition hall during the four weeks of the project and worked further on the issues, debated, or just had dinner together, listened to music, read books or viewed videos. This meant the space was misused for personal activities as well. When the audience came in they started to talk with them about the project's aims and these women involved them in the project's discourse. In the public workshops, geographers, architects, media activists and city planers were confronted by artists, critics and political activists and the same process occurred the other way round in specifically organised panel discussions in a TV studio setting which we used to record the events as well.
In terms of a feminine practice to analyse power structures, but also to produce specific relations, solidarity and forms of collectivity which go beyond reduced identity articulations, the field of everyday life and its living conditions are of same importance as the symbolic space of representation and are shown to be relevant for the production of "Works". These aspects cannot and should not be seen as separated from a political and theoretical point of view, but up until now they always have been in the Art World, and our question was, how can we establish a space that takes this political notion for granted?
But the most interesting aspect in looking back on this processes today is that it was not the act to open the space itself which transgressed the practice of representation, or made it more adequately feminist, but that we established our own history through this act, and helped to form a collectivity which went far beyond the actual show. This creation of a particular but common history, made the project an important point of reference. The project formed a collective memory, a counter cultural narration, as seemingly the participation had not been only symbolic. Sex&Space (Sex & Space website) and MoneyNations (www.moneynations.ch ) as exhibition projects have become a basis for future activities for a lot of people concerned with critiques of heterosexual norms or racist attitudes, as well as a basis for a new notion of capitalist critique from a feminist or queer position, (see i.e. Reproduktions Konten faelschen, by Pauline Boudry, Brigitta Kuster and Renate Lorenz, or my own reflection in the Agenda Publication and other activities by Sex&Space participants) . The institutional practice gave us the possibility for new temporary groupings and collaborations, which are, in one way or another still active today and, much more importantly, they became a means for initiating production and for self-articulation by young feminists and queers at that time, in 1996, when the project was made.
For myself these projects raised all the above mentioned questions, which then influenced later projects like MoneyNations 1 and 2, also held in Zurich and Vienna, where the aspect of self articulation from an anti-racist perspective in relation to cultural producers in Eastern Europe became the central aspect. Sex&Space opened in this way our perceptions about an informal and marginal, but extremely, tactical use of the exhibition space.
Copyright © : Marion von Osten, July 2002
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 16, 2002