Exhibiting Matters

Ausstellen an der
„Kellenkante“
Ana Bezi ć
This it the hermeneutic conundrum: the
interpretation is only possible once interpretation
has begun … In practice
we have to excavate without knowing
what we are excavating, and we have
to define contexts without understanding
them.” 17
Archaeological interpretation, as any
other interpretation, always takes place
from the vantage point of the present and
it points to the situated character of historical,
social, and scientific understanding.
This new reflexive methodology in archaeology
includes ongoing and constantly
changing “interpretation at the trowel’s
edge,” with computer diaries written by
the excavators, video recording of discussions
about interpretation and methodology
carried out in the trenches, and constant
interactions among scientists, locals, politicians,
and other groups who claim some
“ownership” of the past. Reflexivity, here,
refers to a recognition of positionality—that
one’s position or standpoint affects one’s
perspective. 18 It is the insistence on systematic
and rigorous revealing of methodology
and the self as the instrument of data collection
and generation. It is the positioned
subject who makes the interpretations that
are provisional and always incomplete. 19
The process of exhibiting can be
viewed as more than simply presenting
things. It is about a positioned subject making
a statement and a dialogue between
and among exhibits, people, and things.
Therefore, exhibiting becomes a process of
tracing and making new things. Exhibiting
is also thoroughly interpretative. Because
not everything can be presented, we are
left with something, some aspect that cannot
be translated/inscribed. These interpretative
processes leave us with excess that
is uninscribable and untranslatable. And if
difference always remains, 20 how to capture
this excess in the exhibition space?
When does the interpretative moment begin,
and in what ways can it be exhibited?
Archiving, filing, processing, recording,
writing, drawing, painting, cutting, emailing,
and all the work involved in the exhibiting
process prior to the exhibition is
about making the significance of one thing
over the other, about playing down or suppressing
other things that do not interest
us. The excess of meanings and things
that are made in the process of exhibiting
only show the necessity with continual engagement
with interpretation. Latour has
thoroughly hermeneuticized the laboratory,
the inscription 21 process, and the instrument
itself is already a hermeneutic device:
“What is behind a scientific text? Inscriptions.
How are these inscriptions obtained?
By setting up instruments. This other world
just beneath the text is invisible as long as
there is no controversy. A picture of moon
valleys and mountains is presented to us as
if we could see them directly. The telescope
that makes them visible is invisible and so
are the fierce controversies that Galileo had
to wage centuries ago to produce an image
of the Moon.” 22 By making the instrument
visible or forefronted, we would be
positioning ourselves to the things left out.
And if interpretation occurs at “the trowel’s
edge” 23 it means that it already begins
with the process of exhibiting and happens
at every step of the way. How to highlight
and show colors to all the things left out?
Or, in other words, the exhibiting is not only
about sizing and zooming of frames (contexts).
Because frames (contexts), Latour
argues, impose restrictions to the possible
connections, exhibiting could set to investigate
this through the process of shifting
frames (contexts) and the movement, the
flow, and the changes observed in the process.
24 So we can now begin to view exhibiting
as a thing (via Latour), a thing in
conflict rather than stasis, a matter of concern
rather than a matter of fact. 25 How to
demonstrate the existence of all the things
involved in assembling exhibiting. And
once demonstrated, how can they be exhibited?
Can the politics of exhibiting at the
trowel’s edge carve a platform for a more
democratic and inclusive exhibition space
where people will be free to make their own
assemblies of things, with everyone as curator?
■
17 Hodder, The Archaeological Process (see note 15),
p. 92.
18 See Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The
Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston, 2000).
19 See ibid., p. 8.
20 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
(London and New York 1975) and Gaetano
Chiurazzi: “The Universality without domain: The
Ontology of Hermeneutical Practice,” The Journal
of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 48,3
(2017), pp. 198–208.
21 Latour’s inscription is a result of series of transformations/translations
and Latour defines translation
as “the interpretation given by the factbuilders
of their own interests and that of the
people they enroll.” Bruno Latour, Science in Action
(Harvard, 1988), p. 108.
22 Latour, Science in Action (see note 21), p. 69.
23 Hodder, The Archaeological Process (see note 15),
p. 92.
24 See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An
Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
(Oxford, 2005), p. 143.
25 See Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of
Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,”
Critical Inquiry 30 (2004), pp. 225–248.
„[…] denn mögen auch in gewisser
Hinsicht und für leichtfertige Menschen die
nicht existierenden Dinge leichter und verantwortungsloser
durch Worte darzustellen
sein als die seienden, so ist es doch für den
frommen und gewissenhaften Geschichtsschreiber
gerade umgekehrt: nichts entzieht
sich der Darstellung durch Worte so sehr und
nichts ist doch notwendiger, den Menschen
vor Augen zu stellen, als gewisse Dinge, deren
Existenz weder beweisbar noch wahrscheinlich
ist, welche aber eben dadurch,
daß fromme und gewissenhafte Menschen
sie gewissermaßen als seiende Dinge behandeln,
dem Sein und der Möglichkeit des
Geborenwerdens um einen Schritt näher
geführt werden.“
Hermann Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel 1
Durch ortsspezifische Performances, Installationen,
Bauten und Skulpturen transformiert
die Kunst unser Wissen über materielle
Orte, und indem sie ihrem Verständnis
und ihrer Interpretation eine signifikante
neue Dimension verleiht, schreibt sie diese
wieder tief ein. 2 Kann man nun Kunst nicht
an die Arbeit lassen, um genau diese Orte
der Wiedereinschreibung zu erforschen?
Mit Orten der Wiedereinschreibung beziehe
ich mich auf Ausstellungsräume, die die Verbreitung
dessen, was umstritten und dort
noch nicht möglich gewesen ist, in Form
von visueller Darstellung ermöglichen. Die
Produktion visueller Darstellungen mobilisiert
viele Ressourcen, und dennoch sind
die Kunstschaffenden und die mobilisierten
Ressourcen während der Produktion der
visuellen Darstellungen nicht sichtbar und
werden nicht in den Vordergrund gerückt.
Ich schlage das Konzept der „Interpretation
an der Kellenkante“ vor, wie es in der kontextuellen
Archäologie verwendet wird, um
beim Übergang vom Begriff Ausstellung zum
Ausstellen eine Orientierungshilfe zu geben
und Reflexivität als Lackmuspapier, als
Instrument zur Suche nach den fehlenden
Dingen, neu zu positionieren.
Wenn man den Ausstellungsraum als
„Äquivalent eines Laboratoriums, […] eine
1 Hesse, Hermann: Das Glasperlenspiel,
Frankfurt 1971, 3.
2 Vgl. Schofield, John: „Constructing Place. When
Artists and Archaeologists Meet“, in: ders.:
Aftermath. Readings in the Archaeology of Recent
Conflict, New York 2008, 185–196.
213