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"How To Dress for an Exhibition"
(The lecture to which Lumsden was going when intercepted.)
Irit Rogoff
Chair of Art History / Visual Culture at Goldsmiths' College, University
of
London, and am a well dressed critic and scholar of contemporary visual
art
and critical theory.
"The pleasure of resemblance and repetition produces both psychic
assurance and political fetishization. Representation reproduces the Other
as the Same. Performance, insofar as it can be defined as representation
without reproduction, can be seen as a model for another representational
economy, one in which the reproduction of the Other as the Same, is not
assured." (Peggy Phelan, Unmarked)
Participation in the Field of Vision
We all believe in the principle of participation.
From the institutions of parliamentary democracy we sustain to the practices
of listening to, rather than silencing or ignoring, the voices of children,
women, minorities or the handicapped we take part in, we all uphold and
approve the rehtorics of participation as they circulate in political
culture. What we rarely question is what constitutes the listening, hearing
or seeing in and of itself - the good intentions of recognition become
a substitute for the kind of detailed analysis which might serve to expand
the notions of what constitutes a mode of speaking in public, of being
heard by a public.
Of course one of the main issues within this structure is that the question
- whatever the question might be - is inevitably articulated at the centers
of power and it is only the response which is paid attention. What interests
me is the possibility of reading a response as a form of re articulating
the question of what it might be to take part in public sphere culture.
This paper then charts the beginning of an inquiry into the possibilities
that exhibition spaces might provide in order to accommodate the proliferation
of performative acts by which audiences shift themselves from being viewers
to being participants. Furthermore the participation I have in mind goes
beyond an aesthetic identification within the confines of spaces reserved
for artistic practices and towards a model in which these spaces re-engage
with political culture in unexpected ways. The argument is predicated
on a belief that art does not have to be overtly political in its subject
matter in order to produce a political effect thus constituting a politics
rather than reflecting one. It is this differentiation between the subject
matter of works or exhibition thematics and the subject of the exhibition
which is the main issue I should like to get to, albeit via a slightly
circuitous route. In trying to recount a series of scenes in which audiences
produce themselves as the subject of whatever may have been put on view
for their edification, I am arguing that exhibition spaces might indicate
possibilities --rather than provide opportunities -- for self representation.
Since location and situatedness
are everything in my analysis, I want to locate these remarks at the intersection
of three arenas. These arenas make up my working, cultural and personal
life and therefor cut across the numerous levels through which I, for
one, participate in culture.
1. The first of these is the current conjunction of a general cultural
politics of difference (sexual, racial, cultural, etc.) with the intellectual,
analytical possibilities opened up by what Derrida has termed ‘Diffèrance
’, the understanding of differentiation coming about in language
and of enunciation actually producing an event. ‘diffèrenace’
is the process by which meaning is differed - never truly present but
only constructed through the potentially endless process of referring
to other, absent, signifiers. This is the intellectual formulation which
might allow me to move from visibilty as a mode by which presence is assured
in public space to performance which allows for the intimation of a cultural
co-existence in the space with an entity not-yet-named.
2. The second is a moment of cultural funding and of cultural awareness
in the Anglo-American world that has made possible a series of large scale
exhibitions having to do with women artists, feminist histories, gay and
lesbian artists, representations of Black masculinities and many others
which have produced an effect in culture which goes way beyond what took
place in each exhibition. The sheer numbers of the exhibitions and their
accompanying catalogues and of course all of the cultural and intellectual
works that preceded them, makes it possible to begin to theorize issues
of representation and participation beyond the rightness or wrongness
of each specific exhibition.
3. Finally it is important to recognize that all of this can take place
and link up within the context of what we are provisionally calling Visual
Culture -- a field in which critical theories of signification, spectatorship,
consumption and identification are intermingling with the visual; the
arts, film, mass media and cyberspace. As it is not really a field yet,
one does not have to fight against various traditions and orthodoxies
and one has the great luxury of inventing practices. In the shift that
took place from art histories to discourses on representation within cultural
criticism informed by post structuralism and questions of difference during
the 1980s, a certain move was made from looking at cultural artifacts
as reflective to perceiving of them as constitutive. This was of course
part of a much larger question to do with the establishment of meanings.
How and where are meanings determined? By whom? For which readers or viewers?
And through what structures of identification or disidentification?
One of the most important aspects of this shift from the reflective to
the constitutive mode by which visual representations are understood to
signify, is that it has opened up the field of relevant materials to the
location of images almost beyond limits. It is in the wake of this emergent
study of visual culture —one devoid of generic boundaries or hierarchical
mediums, in which difference and subjectivity are constitutive components
of the field rather than analytical additions to it— that it becomes
possible to trace the language shifts that have begun to take place in
the aftermath of displacements, migrations, enslavements, diasporas, cultural
hybridities and nostalgic yearnings undergone by contemporary subjects.
My own practice has been the attempt to shift from writing about art,
in which a certain objectification of objects and territorialization of
knowledge takes place, to an alternative practice of writing with art
-- in which particular work intersects with issues of current and urgent
interest to me, and not simply illustrate them but actually allow me to
think through the next step -- a next step which has not been possible
to conceptualize theoretically.
How does one evolve thoughts towards a theory of participation -- of what
it means to be a full participant in culture? If the emphasis here is
to be shifted from a clear and concensual understanding of what questions
needs to be raised and what issues discussed is to be dislodged - where
and how would one begin to track the potential emergence of an alternative
set of issues or questions and how would one recognize them when one was
actually confronted by the being-articulated-in process?.
In order to try and move from a presence to an absence one has yet to
recognize, one might take a cue from a series of events that have actually
taken place and try and see whether a series of co-existent performative
stances might have emerged alongside these events. At this moment I have
been thinking of 3 separate modes of participation which have been invoked
by a series of exhibitions:
The exhibitions have included;
- Bad Girls ( 3 versions;New
Museum of Contemporary Art, New York and Los Angeles1993 and ICA London
1993.)
- Andere Körper (Other
Bodies, Linz Offenes Kulturhaus, 1994)
- Mise én Scene (ICA,
London 1994)
- Black Male (Whitney Museum
of American Art,N ew York, 1995)
- Inside the Visible (ICA
Boston, Whitechapel,London, Perth, 1996)
- Sexual Politics (UCLA Museum
/ Armand Hammer,Los Angeles 1996)
- In a different light (Berkeley
University Museum / City Lights 1995)
- More than Minimal (Brandeis
University, Rose Art Museum,Boston1996)
Parallel to the overtly cultural discourses of sexual and cultural difference
there has also been a body of Post-structuralist Political theory by the
likes of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe or Giorgio Agamben, which is
questioning the viability of elected parliamentary/democratic institutions
as able to represent the full complexity of peoples’ needs and problems
. This in the wake of identity politics on the one hand, and in recognition
of the centrality of subjectivity in the formation of consciousness and
the need to find ways of integrating this subjectivity into the political
process, on the other. What both discussions share, though through vastly
differing political genealogies is a growing understanding of the limitations
of representation as visibility and the equation of this conjunction into
a model -- the model --for political and cultural participation. Peggy
Phelan, in her ground breaking 1993 book "Unmarked - The Poltics
of Performance", articulates the limits of visibility as representation
thus;
"Currently, however, there is a dismaying similarity in the beliefs
generated about the political efficacy of visible representation. The
dangerous complicity between progressives dedicated to visibility politics
and conservatives patrolling the borders of museums, movie houses and
mainstream broadcasting is based on their mutual belief that representations
can be treated as ‘real truths’ and guarded or championed accordingly.
Both sides believe that greater visibility of the hitherto under-represented
leads to enhanced political power. The progressives want to share this
power with ‘others’; conservatives want to reserve this power
for themselves. Insufficient understanding of the relationship between
visibility, power, identity and liberation has led both groups to mistake
the relation between the real and representational."
Moving from the insistence on a politics of representation to a marking
of performative acts and instances , the possibilities for participatory
activity viewed through these exhibitions seems to function in 3 overarching
schemes:
1. The first is the attempt to construct a historical lineage of participation
(women, feminist art movements, historical moments pierced by less acknowledged,
marginal activity). Thus exhibitions which chart for example the work
of women artists within a wider history, or track an alternative structure
for such a historical account through the work of women artists or bring
into visibility the work of gay and lesbian artists for who a specific
category of institutional display has previously not existed.
2. The second category has been one of Identification with transgression
- a critical and defiant engagement with codes of the normative (behavioral
or artistic)
3. The third strata of activity has been instrumental in producing various
forms of self-staging within the spaces provided by the exhibition. It
is this category, unplanned and unintentional and made possible by some
turning of the fundamental question which informs the exhibition concept,
which I want to focus on.
" How to Dress for an Exhibition"
On a bright and sunny New York afternoon, my friend Abigail, my sister
Daria and I set off to see the "Black Male" exhibition at the
Whitney Museum of American Art. For those of you who are not familiar
with this project, this was an exhibition which explored conjunctions
of Blackness, of masculinities, and of representation in a variety of
media -- ranging from the dizzying heights of the painted canvas to the
lower depths of sports advertising. Curated by Thelma Golden and accompanied
by a distinguished catalogue in which numerous African American writers,
critics and analysts argued the critical issue of the presence/absence
of Black Masculinities in United States culture. The exhibition was enormous,
with more than 60 artists each showing several works. After an hour or
so the sheer taxonomy of the project began to weary me. I had the sense
that I was being shown every image of every imaginable Black masculinity
ever painted, drawn, sculpted, photographed, videoed, digitalized, etc.
As I don’t do all that well in situations of encyclopedic bombardment,
I shifted my attention from the work on display to the audience viewing
it. The first pleasure was to see so many Black men at the Whitney Museum
-- one rarely sees many Black men in mainstream museums in the United
States. On occasion one encounters middle class Black women in museums
taking part in the gendered economy of acquiring cultural capital. But
on this Sunday afternoon there were hundreds of men a the Whitney, deeply
engaged with the exhibition. The second pleasure was the realization of
how spectacularly dressed most of these Black male viewers were -- there
was every variety of clothing from the round caps and flowing sashes of
traditional tribal kanti cloth to Armani suits, to meticulously coordinated
and elaborate sports garb, to the black leather favored by the gay scene
to the tight dresses and fantastic make up of the transvestites. Every
outfit was fully thought out, perfectly presented and very strategically
placed. The third pleasure was the concentration with which the numerous,
long and elaborate texts which played a central role in the exhibition
were being read -- all of these exceptionally well-dressed viewers were
almost performatively reading the texts with the greatest attention to
every detail.
What had happened here was that through a complex amalgam of sartorial
strategies, unplanned and uncoordinated, the viewers had in effect taken
over the exhibition space and put themselves on display within it, virtually
transposing the subject of the exhibition.
I want to use this moment as an opportunity to theorize participation
in relation to marginalized histories and the politics of emergent cultures.
"Black Male" was a particularly interesting moment because it
was a first of its kind in terms of the museum culture and because it
set itself a particular problematic: In his introductory essay, Henry
Louis Gates, one of the most respected mainstream voices of African American
culture, sets two issues for the exhibition project. The first is a question.
"If Blacks were such a dominated group, such an oppressed group",
he asks, "why were such an enormous number of debased negations demanded
to maintain their social control?" He is referring to the enormity
of racist stereotypes which circulate visually in Anglo American culture
-- if you do not have first-hand knowledge of these then you are surely
familiar with them through the visual investigations of racism in the
work of Carrie Mae Weems, of Fred Wilson, of Glen Ligon, Adrian Piper,
Jimmie Durham and of Kara Walker, to mention only a few. Therefore the
issue is to understand why this massive project of visual control is necessary
to contain a group of people supposedly already entirely oppressed by
culture and economics.
Few images in US. culture, and probably in Western culture, are as overladen
with meaning as images of Black masculinity, as Kobena Mercer, Isaac Julian
and Glen Ligon have shown. Black masculinity is simultaneously the site
of fetishized sexual desire and of extreme social phobia, making it a
virtually uncrackable series of photographic, filmic, TV. news, etc. images.
In a similar vein Suzanne Lacey in a massive performance which took place
in Oakland California in 1996 entitled "The Roof is On Fire"
- produced a reversal of the gaze and of who is in language. Lacey with
a large group of collaborators took over a multi story car park in Oakland,
a predominantly Black and economically depressed city in the neighborhood
of Berkeley and of San Francisco. In this car park were several dozen
shiny new cars which had been donated for the evening by local car dealers.
In each car sat a group of teen agers conversing on a subject which had
been set out for them with the windows of the car rolled down. As the
work was done in collaboration with an Oakland High school and as Oakland
is demographically predominantly black, virtually all the adolescents
in the cars were themselves African American. In order to take part in
the work the audience had to walk among the cars in the car park and stick
their head through the windows and listen quietly to the teen agers conversation.
For the majority of this art world audience any previous contact with
Oakland teen agers would presumably take place through the TV screen on
which nightly bulletins of violence, drugs, car thefts and arrests figure
largely. In these images shadowy figures with their head averted would
be led away by police while a reporter provided an alarmed and morally
outraged narrative of the events. In "The Roof is on Fire" all
these relations were reversed; the viewer had to make an effort to both
look at and listen to the conversing youths in the cars, all of the sign
system of the nightly news broadcasts; shiny cars, multi story car parks,
Black youths, TV crews and Fire men were disrupted in this instance and
prevented from telling the familiar narrative. Beyond the disrupted sign
systems, here was a work in which the supremacy of a certain organizing
gaze; white, middle class and privileged was denied and that same audience
was forced into another mode of spectatorship in which it could not presume
to automatically decode and attribute meanings to the signs it was encountering.
I want to deal with images of those who are raced and gendered, and sexualized
and classed, so that they are simultaneously over-represented in the regimes
of vision and under-represented in the institutions of politics.
This discussion takes place at the intersection of 2 discourses of representation:
Visual and Political. This is a far more complex problem than one of redressing
the balance -- of bringing in the under-represented, of showing which
has been out of vision. What is truly at stake is the concept of participation
--
Not participation decreed from above by curatorial intentions;
Not participation organized through the structures and institutions of
political representation;
But participation that is generated by unconscious strategies of self-staging,
be it through dressing, of fantasizing, or fictionalizing.
The men I described before, the viewers of "Black Male", put
themselves on display, they invaded and took over the space, they staged
themselves as the objects on view, they breathed current life into the
notion of Black Masculinity, they pursued a mode of participation that
had not been invented for them through the good intentions of those who
determine the means of participation and the modes of representation.
This was not planned, strategized, coordinated and executed. It simply
happened. But it happened in the wake of a certain political shift of
considerable importance. Following on from the kind of Post-Structuralist
political theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and of Giorgio Agamben:
work that tries to rethink issues of political participation and representation
away from traditional Western parliamentary-based, electoral political
institutions, and towards the unexpected and unconventional ways by which
citizens come into alternative voice and representation. The issue here
is more than simply the rejection of totalizing state ideologies. It is
the realization that we live out complex, fragmented and incoherent subject
positions, that often the different strands of our identity -- sexual
and racial, our education and occupation, our genetic encoding and the
diseases our bodies bear, our learned cultural preferences and our secret
fantasies -- are all at odds with one another. In terms of being able
to come together into one coherent political platform, we are rarely able
to galvanize all of these dimensions into an applied institutional politics.
Instead we are developing a political theory of highly contingent groupings
which give articulation to the often contradictory imperatives of our
identities. Sometimes we meet and hammer out position papers, and campaign
for affirmative action and symbolic representation, and at other times
we simply dress for an exhibition.
Now you may think that my fashion eye was so sharp and focused at the
"Black Male" exhibition because I felt nothing more than a bit
dowdy, not quite as effectively put together as I may have been. Well
let me assure you that we were all three quite elegant -- if memory serves
me Abigail was immaculate in navy blue Sonya Rykiel, Daria was enfolded
within the pleats and creases of Issey Miyaki and I was wearing one of
those austere, minimal German suits I like so much. We were certainly
elegantly turned out -- but quite wrongly in this particular context.
We are all three professional women, charter members of the so-called
‘Art World’, we use our clothes to signify a certain independence
of position, a set of cultural alliances, perhaps even a feminist refusal
of certain female stereotypes. We are no longer in the position of having
to use our clothing as a counter-attack aimed at breaking up the colossal
homogenizations and inherent fears the world entertains about us -- as
did the participants/viewers at "Black Male" -- of not only
bringing the invisible into vision but of making it as complex, as multi-faceted
and as contradictory as we all know ourselves to be. But there is another
dimension to this argument and it has to do with the elicitation of audiences,
of recognizing those who listen and view as active participants not just
as completing the making of meanings but as Michel Foucault argues "The
agency of domination does not reside in the one who speaks (for it he
who is constrained) but in the one who listens and says nothing; not in
the one who knows and answers but in the one who questions and is not
supposed to know." . Our own recognition of the inadequacy of our
self representation within the context of that exhibition space and its
possibilities, of its lack of need to actively represent us, allotted
us that position Foucault articulates of silent partners in someone else’s
process of questioning.
Hot on the heels of "Black Male" came a slew of exhibitions
mentioned earlier:
Inside the Visible
Sexual Politics
Bad Girls
More than Minimal
In a Different Light
And, on a slightly different tack, my own favorite "Mise én
Scene" at London’s ICA. "Mise én Scene" displayed
work by Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun and of 2 young contemporary
British women, Tacita Dean and Virginia Nimarkoh. To be honest I can’t
quite remember what I wore the afternoon I went to see "Mise én
Scene", and I can’t quite remember what anyone else there wore
either -- because the counter-transference of the display was more at
the level of fantasy than of sartoriality. Since the point of the exhibition
-- fictional self-staging -- was not driven home in a pointed, didactic
manner but allowed to emerge in the larger, tranquil, empty spaces between
each artist’s work -- spaces that suggested links between the women’s
art making and which invited us into a state of similar wonder and self-staging
-- I remember well the stories I made up that afternoon, my uncertainty
of whether Tacita Dean actually existed and my certainty that it didn’t
matter as I could nevertheless participate in the inventive narrative
that was her/her work. More than anything it reminded me of Theresa de
Laurentis’ descriptions of the work of the Libreria Della Donna in
Milan whose members would rewrite the endings of great literary classics
according to emergent feminist desires. Some of these exhibitions brought
attention to the work of women artists, some to the history of feminist
art, others attempted to subject a term such as "Minimal art"
to sexual difference, others attempted to invoke sexuality as the transgression
of normative bourgeoisie heterosexuality, or allowed us, as in "Mis
én Scene", to write our fantasy scenarios into the destabilized
spaces between the artifacts on show.
Each one of these exhibitions, more or less successfully dealt with issues
of the representation of the marginal and with strategies of participation
within the larger map of culture. All put forward an alternative to that
model of participation determined by the good intentions and democratic
aspirations of curators and organizers. Running the gamut from Hans Jurgen
Olbrist’s very unfortunate project "Take Me I’m Yours"
at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 1996, to Christine Hill’s
far more complex "Thrift Shop" at Documenta X in 1997 and soon
to be transposed to New York’s P.S.1 -- these exemplify the models
of participation predicated on a predetermined strategy, its rules set
out as if in a game, its audiences treated like mice in some scientific
experiment in which they scuttle through mazes and pedal on carousels
in order to prove some point. What is so disappointing about such projects
is not the effect of the projects themselves but the curatorial assumptions
which sustain them . Assumptions about processes of democratizing cultural
instiutions by giving audiences some mechanical task to carry out and
involving the materials of every day life; old clothes, chewed gum, newspapers,
anonymous photographs etc’. In these choreographed games no attention
is paid to the power bases of the institutions themselves, to the needs
of the audiences, to the possibility that these visitors might have something
of value and relevance to say if only given the space and the possibility
and the legitimacy to articulate it. Perhaps most irritating is the use
of everyday materials galvanized to act out some fantasy of democracy
in action. These materials are familiar and not highly valued and therefore
presumably perceived as ‘popular’, in setting them up a priori
as a set of alternative cultural materials not only is nothing new being
introduced into the discursive realm of the exhibition but that very possibility
of actually encountering either an unknown formulation or the unexpected
subversive deployment of them, a Situationist ‘detournage’ of
familiar materials, is effectively blocked. In these not very reflexive
attempts to democratize high culture, the lessons of early mass media
theory, which might have been useful, are being ignored. Already in the
1920s Sigfried Krackauer questioned the ‘mass’ in mass media;
it was not the numerical size of the audience the media were reaching,
he argued, and it was not the number of mechanically reproduced items
which were being circulated out there. Rather this ‘mass’ was
about the emergence of centrally organized responses and identifications
which cut across previously marked differences . Thus it is never materials
themselves that are ‘popular’ or ‘mass’ but the responses
they elicit and the patterns that those responses might take.
In the amalgam of exhibitions and audience self-stagings over the past
couple of years -- perhaps not in what was put forward alone in each one
but rather in what came together between them all -- we find a correlation
to strands of contemporary political theory -- to work that tries to rethink
political representations and participation away from traditional election-based
institutions and towards the unexpected and unconventional means by which
citizens come into alternative voice and representation. A political theory
and a cultural practice that takes into account the fantasmatic, the subjective,
the unplanned -- like Princess Diana’s funeral in London in 1997.
We did not learn a great deal about the Princess herself and I doubt that
what we were exposed to on our TV screens actually constituted an outpouring
of feelings towards her exclusively. We all agreed that what we had witnessed
was a shift in the representations and signification of cultural stereotypes
by a populace that felt constrained within a tradition and its modes of
representation which no longer expressed all the changes that had occurred
in their society. Through the formal trappings and ceremonies of an extremely
emotive event these audiences took over the space and staged these changes
by performing various emotions for which there was no system of agreed
upon public representation and for which no permission existed. More than
the actual elections which took place in Britain four months earlier and
which brought about a radical political shift in terms of parliamentary
representation, the conclusion after the public staging of emotion in
August 1997 was that "Britain had changed" . Confused about
all this and on the eve of my own move across the Atlantic to London I
called a friend in London and asked what he thought. He said "did
you ever think you would see thousands of British men weeping in the streets?",
I most certainly had not and wondered to myself if this was a new benchmark
in which we would now read political and social change through the stagings
of ‘having a good cry’.
Vienna - Scenes from a Performative Unconscious
The importance I attribute to these performative moments has largely to
do with how they indicate a politics at the level of the unconscious,
a politics that cannot be articulated as yet within existing discourse
or currently available permissions.
Earlier this year I did a guest stint in Vienna with a group of colleagues
who work on issues of museum theory and hold positions in museums and
academic institutions in the city. We read various texts in the critical
study of museums and display practices and visited many of the city’s
museums to try and see how we might read those actual strategies in relation
to some of the critical models we were dealing with. The following are
string of disparate moments from that week and which I perceived as a
performative unconscious on all of our behalf.
In Vienna’s small Jewish Museum an exhibition was on show entitled
"Masks" . As there is really no carnival tradition within Judaism
I was initially puzzled as to what might be the subject of the exhibition.
Finally it became clear that the masks on display were death masks of
victims of experiments conducted on living human subjects throughout the
Nazi extermination camps. These had been recently found in the basement
of Vienna’s Museum of Natural History by someone researching something
else , having originally been purchased directly from one of the scientific
institutions carrying out the experiments by the museum for its collections
in 1943 and subsequent to their rediscovery, had been embarassedly shunted
off to the Jewish museum.
The previous day we had also been to the Jewish Museum but to look at
its permanent display which consists primarily of holograms of Jewish
life in the city prior to the Second World War. In discussing the display
which is exemplary for its effort not to try and replace the now absent
inhabitants by a plethora of compensatory objects but to play with that
very absence through the ghostly medium of holograms - we talked of the
fact that the real absence in this display was that of anti-semitism,
of the ideological and behavioral racism which animated this vast cataclysmic
tragedy we now call the ‘holocaust’. I thought to myself that
I would like to be able to see that hate, that confusion not in the familiar
scenes of violence and aggression but in small every day life acts and
patterns. What did the faces at one of Freud’s first public lectures
look like as they sat and listened to their entire world order being turned
around ?, what was the expression of the readers of Karl Krauss when the
language they were so familiar with was taken away and transformed ?.
It is not so much in the moments in which subjects are marked out as different
as in those moments when the shared culture is marked out as different,
that true psychic violence in the form of racism takes place.
The very next day, at the "Masks" exhibition we were given access
to this very process. The exhibition had been assembled out of the meager
remaining material that testify to that particular moment of experiments
on human subjects within the contexts of extermination camps, enslavements,
war and the dehumanization of subjects along the lines of racial difference.
Starting off with the names of camps and the diseases experimented with
in each one, it continued with an exchange of letters between the director
of a scientific institute in Posen involved in these experiments and the
director of the Museum of Natural History in Vienna who wanted to purchase
some of the death masks made from the recent victims, for their collection.
Beyond all the factual details of the exchange, it was the tortuously
polite, elaborate and ritualized courtesy of the exchange which is the
primary shock. We find here access to precisely what was missing from
the earlier displays I described, the civil, bureaucratically sanctioned
face of virulent anti semitism winding its way through letters with long,
ornate, flowery sentences full of honorifics and titles and in which the
word Jew is not mentioned once. At some point in the exchange a break
occurs and we find a hand written letter from the wife of the Posen scientist
who announces that ‘the honorable doctor, professor, director of
the medical institute, my husband’ has died as a result of an infection
caught from one of ‘the criminal corpses’ he was operating on.
This, according to my knowledgeable Viennese colleagues, was part of a
successful bid for a war widow’s pension, yet another link in the
chain of rhetorical gestures which serve to tame and mask the horror of
what is being dealt with. The exhibition continued with the ethereal death
masks themselves, far less horrifying than I had feared and with more
documentation on the medical practitioners who had requested and justified
the program of experiments. coming out one is confronted with one’s
own face caught by a delayed time camera and shown on a series of monitors.
All of the confusion, incomprehension, revulsion and whatever other responses
one might have had, are projected again as part of what is on display
- the disassociation one might have sought refuge in faced with such exhibits,
has been denied one.
After viewing the exhibition we met with the curators who were impressive
in their reflexive questioning of their own practice and willing to experiment
rather than to be seen to ‘do the right thing’ in view of the
nature of the history and of the materials they were displaying. I asked
what the reaction in the Austrian press had been to the show as I had
never seen anything quite like it and thought it had begun the long and
necessary road towards the reconstitution of the actual object on display.
"Response?" said the curator, "There was no Response".
More than anything else I encountered on that occasion this brief answer
marked the performative nature of this project - the immense effort to
engage in another form of discussion about a shared history, blocked by
the impossibility of producing a response. For all the immensity of activity,
the money spent in the city, the books written and read, the commemoration
monuments etc.’ there was no existent discourse in whose context
an actual response could be produced. To reveal this absence behind the
plethora of activity one required precisely such a performative moment.
The other scene I wanted to invoke is less grim - less weighty but not
without its own consequences. My colleagues had told me about a contemporary
art work which had been set up next to the Staatsoper in the city center
which we ought to look at . Made by two young artists, it is a white cube
with text on each side in the four main languages of internationally circulating
culture. On the cube are detailed, factual accounts of how the Austrian
state is dealing with refugees at the present - some of them are in camps
and prisons, others are being sent back to clearly grim fates, only few
are allowed refuge etc.’. We stopped by on our way elsewhere, by
the side entrance to the Staatsoper a group of young men dressed in 18th
century costumes and wigs were distributing pamphlets to the tourists
wandering by what is obviously one of the city’s greatest glories
and cherished landmarks. The location of the cube next to the opera house
was intriguing and provocative, it made me want to think again about the
absence of a discourse I had been so convinced of the day before at the
Jewish museum. From the corner of my eye, while reading the text on the
cube, I noticed the young ‘Mozarts’ by the opera beginning to
focus their attention on us-- we had stopped too long, were paying too
much attention to the text, did not look like tourists with our reading
glasses and crammed briefcases, were talking animatedly -- clearly something
was not right. As we made to leave the square, the young men lined up
like a chorus line in a Broadway musical and shouted at us in unison,
in English "There is no racism in Austria". You would have to
agree that one could not be treated to a more perfect moment , a more
perfect performative moment of collective denial - the pastel satin knee
britches, embroidered coats and white powdered wigs glittering in the
autumn sunshine, the work of memory being carried out in different pockets
of the city totally erased in one tiny, ridiculous act of negation.
There were other such moments during my stay in Vienna, moments which
will no doubt surface in other papers and other discussions. What is so
significant about the brief performative incidents I have been trying
to recount is that they could never be accommodated with the existing
structure of political and social analysis. This is where the performative
and the representational are so clearly divergent. Performance comes into
its own in the name of an unease, in the arena of a promise of something
that is yet to come, yet to be articulated and of agency yet to be recognized,
yet to be named. The political dichotomies and the political potential
in the distinctions between representation linked to ‘identity politics’
and enunciation linked to performance are of considerable value in the
attempt to try and understand a politics-to-come. As Peggy Phelan has
distinguished; "The current contradiction between ‘identity
politics’ with its accent on visibility, and the psychoanalytical/deconstructionist
mistrust of visibility as the source of unity or wholeness needs to be
refigured, if not resolved. ...... "Visibility is a trap..; it summons
surveillance and the law, it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, the colonial/imperial
appetite for possession. Yet it retains a certain political appeal. Visibility
politics have practical consequences; a line can be drawn between a practice
(getting someone seen or read) and a theory (if you are seen it is harder
for ‘them’ to ignore you, to construct a punitive cannon); the
two can be reproductive. While there is a deeply ethical appeal in the
desire for a more inclusive representational landscape and certainly underrepresented
communities can be empowered by an enhanced visibility, the terms of this
visibility often enervate the putative power of these identities."
Elsewhere in her book Phelan contrasts this investment in making visible
with performance whose "only life is in the presence. Performance
cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the
circulation of representation of representation: once it does so it becomes
something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts
to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise
of its own ontology. Performance’s being, like the ontology of subjectivity
(proposed here) , becomes itself through disappearance."
Away from the pre-determinism of the model of the state, of a cultural
politics that dares to assume that we even know what the problems are,
never mind the answers, of curatorial practices that position us as players
of games -- immense shifts have taken place in the possibility of self
articulation by groups who do not recognize themselves within the existing,
officially sanctioned languages in culture -- in part because we are finally
learning to read against the grain , in part because ‘acting out’
is recognized for its unconscious significances rather than as rude or
unacceptable behavior, in part because we recognize ourselves to be the
‘enunciated’ of others performances and in part because we have
at long last learned how to dress for an exhibition.
Footnotes for essay:
1. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked - The Politics of Performance, New York and
London, 1993, p.3
2. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Radical democracy,
Verso, 1986 and Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, Minnesota, 1996.
3. Phelan, op. cit.p.2
4. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, New York, Pantheon ed.
1978,p.64.
5. Sigfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, (edited and translated by Tom
Levine) Harvard University Press, 1996. See also Gertrude Koch,
Kracauer - Zur Einfuhrung, Junius Verlag, Frankfurt. 1997
6. A catalogue to the exhibition was not available, therefore all the
information recounted here was taken from notes and conversation at the
Jewish Museum of Vienna with Felicitas Heyman-Jelineck, the curator, in
October 1997.
7 . Phelan, op.cit.p.7
8. Phelan.op.cit.146.
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