ARTIFICIAL HELLS

former west
II. Performative Exhibitions
Similar experiments with spectatorship were taking in place in France at
this time (and to a lesser extent in Germany), but with an emphasis on
‘sociability’ rather than social responsibility. A younger generation of
artists including Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno and Dominique
Gonzales- Foerster turned to the exhibition as a creative medium. The
formal experiments introduced by these artists included prolonging the
period before an exhibition opened and after it closed, including works that
may be off- site or absent from the actual exhibition space, changing the
appearance of the exhibition through the duration of the show, and interfering
with the exhibition’s communicational apparatus (audio- guides,
information labels, tours, and so on). Another strategy was to read other
presentation formats through the lens of the exhibition: a magazine
(Maurizio Cattelan’s Permanent Food, 1995–), a night of performance
(Parreno and Hans- Ulrich Obrist’s ‘Il Tempo del Postino’, 2007–) or a
farm in Thailand (Rirkrit Tiravanija’s The Land, 1999–) were all conceived
as types of display. The actual importation of other formats into the exhibition
– music, magazines, cooking, journalism, advertising, television, new
technologies, and particularly cinema – substituted for sytems of representation
and illustration. 40 Nicolas Bourriaud went so far as to claim that ‘it is
the socius . . . that is the true exhibition site for artists of the current generation’
– a socius understood, however, less in terms of society’s users and
inhabitants, than as the distributive channels through which information
and products flow. 41
For this generation of artists, the desire to experiment with exhibitions
derived primarily from a frustration with the conventions of exhibitionmaking
as inherited from the 1980s, based around the presentation of
objects for consumption on the market. 42 As early as 1991, the curator
Eric Troncy dismissed the extent to which ‘an exhibition is nothing more
than a social show, a convention’, and he later lamented how the 1980s
had reduced the exhibition to a ‘mere showroom’. 43 In particular he
objected to thematic group shows weighed down by a theme and resulting
in an illustrative outcome. Rather than conceiving of the exhibition as
an a posteriori format in which to exhibit already existing works, Troncy
preferred to think the exhibition as ‘an a priori artists’ project – an experiment
whose outcome was altogether uncertain . . . throughout the
different phases of its successive materialisations’. 44 At stake in this shift
– from a group show organised around a theme, to the creation of a
project that unfolds in time – was a position of authorial renunciation: to
‘delegate to the artists the collective responsibility for the exhibition in its
entirety’. 45 Troncy thus positioned himself as a collaborator or facilitator
working alongside the artist (a position not unlike that of the community
artist working to facilitate lay creativity). This desire for open- endedness
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