Exhibiting Matters

Praxis Reports / 2
Exhibiting at the
“Trowel’s Edge”
Ana Bezi ć
“For although in a certain sense and for
light-minded persons non-existent things
can be more easily and irresponsibly represented
in words than existing things, for
the serious and conscientious historian it
is just the reverse. Nothing is harder, yet
nothing is more necessary, than to speak
of certain things whose existence is neither
demonstrable nor probable. The very fact
that serious and conscientious men treat
them as existing things brings them a step
closer to existence and to the possibility of
being born.”
Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game 1
Through site-specific performances, installations,
buildings and sculptures, art transforms
our knowledge of material places, and
by providing a significant new dimension to
its understanding and interpretation, it re-inscribes
them deeply. 2 Well then, cannot art
be put to work to investigate those very places
of re-inscription? By places of re-inscription
I refer to the exhibition spaces that render
what is contested and not-yet-there possible
to circulate in the form of visual representation.
The production of visual display mobilizes
many resources and yet, while producing
the visual display, the artists and
the resources mobilized are not visible or
forefronted. I propose the concept of “interpretation
at trowel’s edge” as used in contextual
archaeology to aid in navigating the
shift from the exhibition to exhibiting and to
re-position reflexivity as litmus paper, the
tracing agent of missing things.
If we reconsider the exhibition space as
the “equivalent of a laboratory, [a] place of
trials, experiments and simulations” 3 they
no longer can be thought as places of knowledge
reproduction. Rather, through the processes
of exhibiting (as in the production
of visual display) these spaces generate
new knowledges and new things. Hermann
Hesse, in his novel The Glass Bead Game,
has poignantly written that by treating things
“whose existence is neither demonstrable
nor probable […] as existing things” 4 we
come one step closer to their existence. How
to translate this into the exhibition space?
How to make space that traces the steps of
the process of exhibiting?
In approaching the exhibition space we
are already creating, arranging, assembling
or, in other words, interpreting. The word
“exhibit,” deriving from its Latin root exhibere
(ex- “out” + -habere “to hold”), makes
space for the exhibition that holds out objects
and presents them (as evidence in
court, as facts that speak for themselves).
It is expected of them to speak, and rather
than being actors in their own rights, they
continue to act as vehicles of human intentions.
For objects to “speak” it requires human
modification and so all these objects
held out and exhibited are in need of interpretation.
Bruno Latour argues that objects
behave in “the most undisciplined ways,
blocking the experiments, disappearing
from view, refusing to replicate, dying, or
exploding … they always resist” 5 our interpretation.
Being a stand in, they object to
what is being told about them, they multiply,
they become something else.
This hidden geography of objects was
also explored in Peter Weibel and Bruno
Latour’s “Making Things Public” 2005 exhibition
at ZKM – Museum of Contemporary
Art. They used a museum to stage an exhibition
experiment where “the ability of artists,
politicians, philosophers, scientists and the
visitors” was tested to make “the shift from
the aesthetics of objects to the aesthetics
of things.” 6 The exhibition was based on the
notion of assembly, that is, the power of objects
to gather around themselves a different
assembly, to conceptualize exhibitions
as spaces of enactments, which open new
alliances between authors, works, and visitors.
7 In it, some worlds are heavily intertwined,
others vaguely, and some completely
separated from each other. As
Latour explains:
“Things-in-themselves? But they’re fine,
thank you very much. And how are
you? You complain about things that
have not been honored by your vision?
You feel that these things are lacking
the illumination of your consciousness?
If you miss the galloping freedom of the
zebras in the savannah this morning,
then so much worse for you; the zebras
will not be sorry that you were not there,
and in any case you would have tamed,
killed, photographed, or studied them.
Things in themselves lack nothing.” 8
As much as we want to observe galloping
zebras in the savannah, they are not
concerned about us in order to exist. With
objects presented as possessing unique
qualities in and of themselves, the position
has shifted from the singular/human privi-
leged knowledge production to the more
democratic forms of knowledge also known
as flat ontology. 9 In this paradigm, each
voice, be it historical, archaeological, social
or spanning diverse disciplinary understanding
is valid. Within this displacement
of human-thing center, archaeology brings
in a particular way of thinking and engaging
with things in which human and things are
entangled and dependent on one another. 10
The notion of entanglement serves as an integrating
concept to describe and analyze
the dynamic relationship, “the dialectic of
dependence and dependency between humans
and things.” 11 Unlike Latour’s mixing
of humans and things in networks of interconnections,
the concept of entanglement,
as used by Hodder, is a sticky environment,
one where entities are both things and objects,
“they are both relational and they ‘object’,
oppose and entrap.” 12 Instead of an
entirely relational treatment of matter, the
position taken by Latour and ANT (Actor-
Network Theory), the emphasis is on affordance
and potentialities things give to humans
and on the power of things to entrap. 13
In archaeology—here seen as a way
of thinking and engaging with things—the
significance lies in the process of doing it,
more so than the results of the endeavor. A
substantial proportion of primary data collection
takes place through excavation and
surface survey. At its center are the context,
a nexus of entanglements both past
and present, and reflexivity with its continuing
integration in every aspect of archaeological
“doing.” Contextual archaeology
is focused on an interpretative practice
that is both making sense of the past while
being firmly grounded in the present. By interpretation
I mean thick descriptions 14 and
follow Hodder who argues that interpretative
judgments are made even at the most
descriptive of statements. 15 He gives an
example of codified soil description where
the grittiness, amount of inclusions, etc. involves
subjectivity in describing it. Furthermore,
site reports, long seen as nothing but
descriptive accounts, are depersonalized
and generalized, made to look as if anyone
could do them. Interpretation cannot easily
be separated from description.
The archaeologist makes sense of the
past, provides orientations, significance,
knowledge and meanings relevant to understanding
it. The notion of entanglement, as
described above, involves dependency and
entrapment, histories that need interpreting.
Interpretation is then making sense of
this process, where meaning is the product
of the context, and is continually produced
through the working set of relationships we
establish. 16
“As the hand and trowel move over
the ground, decisions are being made
about which bumps, changes in texture,
colors to ignore and which to
follow … how we excavate (trowel,
shovel, sieving) depends on an interpretation
of context … But the interpretation
of context depends on knowing
about the objects within it. So ideally
we would want to know everything
that is in the pit before we excavate it!
1 Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
(London, 2000), p. 2.
2 See John Schofield, “Constructing Place: When
Artists and archaeologists meet,” in Aftermath.
Readings in the Archaeology of Recent Conflict,
ed. John Schofield (New York, 2008), pp. 185–196.
3 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction
to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford, 2005), p. 159.
4 Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (see note 1).
5 Bruno Latour, “When Things Strike Back: A Possible
Solution of ‘Science Studies’ to the Social Sciences,”
The British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 1 (2000),
pp. 107–123, esp. p. 116.
6 Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour, “Experimenting
With Representation: Iconoclash and Making Things
Public,” in Exhibition Experiments, eds. Sharon
McDonald and Paul Basu (Oxford, 2007), p. 106.
7 See ibid.
8 Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France
(Cambridge, 1998), p. 193.
9 Manual De Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual
Philosophy (London, 2013).
10 See Ian Hodder, Studies in Human-Thing
Entanglement (Chichester, 2016).
11 See ibid., p. 5.
12 See ibid., p.18.
13 See ibid.
14 See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures:
Selected Essays (New York, 1973).
15 See Ian Hodder, The Archaeological Process: An
Introduction (Oxford, 1999), pp. 68–69.
16 See Julian Thomas, Time, Culture and Identity
(London, 1996), p. 236.
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