Community as Context
What does "community" really mean and what is the artist’s relationship or responsibility to it? What effect, if any, do artists have on various communities or the culture at large?
Julie Ault
Exhibition: Entertainment, Practice, Platform
I want to talk today about exhibition making as a medium, as a practice engaged with issues of "community" and public definition or identification. Embedded in that discussion are some considerations about museum tendencies in contemporary museums. How does community get addressed through a practice? I have selected three exhibitions I was involved in organizing with the collaborative Group Material and another I visited several times as an observer, alt.youth.media, at the New Museum in 1996, to provide an indepth analysis of how community gets represented or addressed through a practice; how a picture of community get described in a museum for instance. I’ll begin with these two quotes, the first from Mary Kelly from Screen Magazine in 1981.
In terms of analysis, the exhibition system marks a crucial intersection of discourses, practices and sites which define the institutions of art within a definitive social formation. Moreover, it is exactly here, within this inter-textual, inter-discursive network that the work of art is produced as text.1
The second is from Tony Bennett in The Birth of the Museum: History, theory, politics, published in 1995.
In practice, museums and especially art galleries, have often been effectively appropriated by social elites so that, rather than functioning as institutions of homogenization, as reforming thought had envisaged, they have continued to play a significant role in differentiating elite from popular social classes. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the museum is neither simply a homogenizing not simply a differentiating institution: its social functioning, rather, is defined by the contradictory pulls between these two tendencies.2
Where does the exhibition end?
Noticeably or not, all exhibitions advocate something, whether a political position, a type of descriptive system, a new product line, or the belief in transcendent aesthetic experience. Exhibitions are designed experiential systems within which art, artifacts, objects, products and information are brought into constructed environments: messages and meanings are maneuvered through the treatment of visual, spatial, aesthetic, design, ideological, psychological, and emotional factors. Although certain characteristics define what is commonly thought of as an exhibition, exhibitory practices–presentational and representational–abound in culture-at-large. In this essay, exhibition refers to selected elements from material culture temporarily arranged in interior spaces. Given that interior exhibitions are architecturally contained, the relations between an exhibition, its hosting institution and the space it is in, are primary factors contributing to how an exhibition and its composing elements are seen and understood.
When I was a child my parents often took me to museums. The announcement of a "museum day" produced a mixture of emotions and associations: Because I "liked art" and liked going to the city I got excited, but expectancy was mitigated by a sinking feeling that punishment was on the horizon. Visiting the museum meant once inside I was required to be quiet and behave for hours according to a set of tacit regulations I couldn't easily comply with. Alternatively, a visit to the supermarket meant I could go wild if I wanted. Supermarkets were never boring and aesthetic experiences were guaranteed. Museums were not originally planned as popular havens, quite the opposite: the museum represented a cultural oasis only recognizable as such to the properly enculturated individual. Among other things, 19th century museums were designed as repositories for public education, not only for teaching art history and categorizations of culture, but for encouraging good manners. Museums performed partly as disciplinary regulative institutions.
Like exhibition planners, store designers are interdisciplinary practitioners, balancing architectural and spatial concerns, graphic design, interior decoration, and lighting in order to create an engaging support system for "the goods," a credible space of presentation and representation. Stores and showrooms are increasingly treated as environments within which every detail is styled in support of the narrative atmosphere being evoked: systems of products are presented with a storyline. Imagineering stores with "a point of view," and "clarity of offer" are forms of thematization not unlike what occurs in exhibition-making. It's no secret that public spaces are planned and engineered to promote and elicit particular responses from users. Just as there is a "science of shopping,3" according to which retailers can order their spaces and product displays for highest profitability, exhibition making is also frequently reduced to a science reliant on a limited vocabulary of tried and true structuring devices, increasingly market researched. Manuals on exhibition planning provide descriptions of methods, formats and guiding systems and their respective functions, down to suggesting typefaces and point sizes for making signage information legible from particular distances.4 Just as consumer behavior is surveilled and analyzed, spectator habits are measured and institutional environments revised accordingly to attract.
In her essay Dissenting Spaces, Judith Barry speaks about efforts in the 1920s to transform exhibition viewers into participant observers in order to satisfy then-new cultural demands of the "urban masses."...Increasingly, these cultural demands were resolved under the sway of another kind of exhibition design, one designed not simply for display, but specifically for consumption, to cause an active response in the consumer, to create an exchange. This is the situation of the retail store. For it is in these spaces, in which one lives and works and through whose media apparatuses one is enculturated, that we find the congruence of the theatrical and ideological, to my way of thinking, the culmination of exhibition design.5
A particular narrative defines the symbolic organization and concrete ingredients of an exhibition. The resultant structure expresses and reproduces its ideological position. Commonly exhibitions are built from ingredients which invoke categories by utilizing schemes based on periodizing, geographical locale, manner or style of cultural production. In turn, these structures are segmented into categories which in themselves
orient the viewer to what is being seen and understood. Exhibitions and shopping environments both provide directional guides in the forms of paths, wall texts, signage systems, or indexes for viewers and to navigate with. But master plan arrangements are not merely for the sake of making information accessible. One wonders what other purposes inform such systems and what order is served by such ordering.
Restructuring and reordering processes posed by some artists and curators challenge more than people's abilities to manage material and information intellectually. Such processes potentially challenge the very categorizations, distinctions, and hierarchies by which power-determined social relations are reproduced
Except for those people invested in the field and those in search of either a proper art experience, or alternatively, an entertaining distraction, static art exhibitions appears increasingly archaic. Despite attempts to contemporize and reinvigorate the framework, exhibition as a historical form seems old-fashioned. Relative to the local video store, attendance at museums and art exhibitions is low. People seem less inclined to visit cultural venues and circulate in public, and more prone to let culture come to them. Spectatorship as social process is relocated in the reformation of cultural space in which entertainment, information and events are
transmitted into domestic situations. The distribution of screen real-estate in the forms of televisions and computers has profoundly altered the terms of cultural engagement and transfigured preceding boundaries of public and private domains. These technological trends produce a symbiotic operation of increased cultural engagement at home and reduced taking part in shared public situations. As Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman insightfully declared in their video work in 1973 "Television Delivers People." The product of television, commercial television, is people. Mass media means that a medium can deliver mass numbers of people...Media asserts an influence over an entire cultural spectrum without effort or qualification.
How have arts institutions responded to their threatened obsolescence? Those museum directors desirous of and dependent on expanding publics who pay entrance fees renovate their physical plants to increase retail and restaurant spaces, thereby making museums more entertaining multi-use destinations. Utilization of special effects, spectacular technology and the promise of interactivity are prevalent contemporizing strategies. Museum programming is increasingly calculated with numbers in mind; "blockbusters" are staged to meet those targeted numbers; and "outreach" is made to "under-served populations" communities by educational departments. One historical function of museums was to unite communities (i.e. bourgeois) through identification processes consolidated within the institutional apparatus. But such fixed communities have largely dispersed, depriving many museums of their fundamental constituent base. One consequence: museums began hunting down new communities. Another strategy to resuscitate art institutions and reinvigorate contemporary art is to displace the art altogether by locating expositions sited throughout the "city at large," connecting it to "the real world." Such dispersion-style exhibitions feature the museum's own decentralization as a structuring device. Not only artworks are displaced from their expected location, the
museum is also dislocated and superimposed on the city-at-large, potentially superimposed on any or all public places.
The tactics deployed to popularize going to the museum have eroded their historically composed auras. Museums, the collections they contained, and sponsored exhibitions served clearer ideological purposes in former times before their authority was challenged. Museological authority has been disputed and reimagined from disparate sources including artists engaged in various forms of institutional critique, congressional caucuses, "taxpayers" and museums' own strategic integration as mentioned above. Contradictions between elitist histories and popularization tendencies are currently being played out in many arts institutions.
Cultural Policies and Cultural Politics
From artists, curators might well learn how to present objects in a more open-ended fashion, how to suggest rather than assert ideas embodied in objects and, finally, how to consider the presentation itself as a mutable, contingent thing.6
The selection and arrangement of materials within a designed environment constitutes a form of cultural practice and production. Principles of practice set the stage for and determine the particulars of any exhibition and how it looks. The social relations between organizers, participants, contractors, funders, institution staff, audience members, and critics brought to bear in exhibition-making processes influence what is produced. It's no wonder that galleries, museums, and non-profit spaces whose internal structures are bureaucratic and hierarchical, reliant on standardized procedures, often mount conventional and formulaic exhibitions planned around formal correspondences and historical trajectories. Approaching curatorial and exhibition-making activities anew in relation to the contents of material and relevant contexts, rather than adhering to traditional display modes of fine art produces different results in respect to what an exhibition looks like.
The exhibition making I've been involved in while working within the artists' collaborative Group Material as well as independently uses the temporary exhibition as a medium through which models of social and representational structures are posited. Given that Group Material's practice was contextual, in order to better understand the production and reception of the cited projects it is necessary to provide a view of the then-relevant conditions in the art field and the larger social field.7
In the late 1970s and in the beginning of the 80s the context for working as an artist in New York was polarized. There was a resurgence of commercially viable neo-expressionist painting with the heroic (artist) figure foregrounded. In the background was a field of critical art practices and discourses informed by feminism, civil rights, punk and do-it-yourself culture.
Commercial viability dictates degrees of conformity (or degrees of rebelliousness) in relation to dominant aesthetic trends and corresponding ideological principles supported within the art world system and its constellation of power relationships. Critical examination revealed to many that then-existing institutions, commercial and institutional, were limited. Possibilities for participation within them and the social dynamics implied were preordained within a system of deeply rooted power relations and biases reflective of those in American culture at large. Rather than responding to market 'needs' many artists, curators, and writers–some driven by social concerns–developed different working methods and built venues based on self-determination and non-hierarchical organizational models. With a sense of entitlement to effect culture engendered in part by the political and cultural activism of the 1960s, people created alternative models as community building blocks and to address the inadequate ways art was being generated, taught, exhibited, circulated and distributed in American society. Through its activities Group Material was one among many efforts to theorize representation as a contested arena and create venues for self-representation.
The exhibitions discussed here share certain features: they were organized using non-traditional curatorial methods and criteria forgathering, selecting, and combining components, and, they employ display systems of dense arrangements which encourage relational readings rather than applying strategies intended to provide objects with an illusion of autonomy. For Group Material specific exhibitions evolved from and expanded upon the collaborative's process of discursive engagement with a subject.
In 1980 Group Material rented a storefront space on East 13th Street: The intention, to make a room of our own as a laboratory within which exhibitions and events with social themes would be staged. For the first year or so the group consisted of thirteen members.8 Balancing multiple audiences and constituencies, we sought to develop relationships with people living in the neighborhood, relationships with colleagues, like-minded cultural producers, and the more abstract 'art world'. From the year on 13th Street one project in particular, The People's Choice, functioned effectively for redressing notions of public through an exhibition. That project manifest as an eclectic collection of everyday objects usually kept in homes, brought into an exhibition space accessible to all passerby. The collecting process began on January 1, 1981 when a letter was distributed door-to-door to residents living on the block. In part it read: Dear friends and neighbors of 13th Street. Group Material is having an exhibition and you're invited. Group Material is the gallery that opened this October at 244 East 13th. We are a group of young people who have been organizing different kinds of events in our storefront. We've had parties, art shows, movies and art classes for the kids who are always rushing in and out. The Peoples' Choice is the title of our next exhibition. We would like to show things that might not usually find their way into an art gallery. The things that you personally find beautiful, the objects that you keep for your own pleasure, the objects that have meaning for you your family and your friends. What could these be? They can be photographs, or your favorite posters. If you collect things, these objects would be good for this exhibition.9 Unfortunately this letter didn't persuade as intended. We anticipated a rush of deliveries from smiling neighbors enthused by the idea of "making your own show." But people were slow to respond, and questioned how their belongings would be cared for and used. We got more aggressively personable in our solicitations. The process gained steam: as people saw other people bringing in their family pictures and favorite things, their exhibitor fantasies were fueled and competition became a motor. Soon, everyone wanted a piece of the action, a place on the wall. Over the following weeks more and more items were brought in until the walls were covered in a salon-style display.
The People's Choice was intended to interrogate the traditional museum collection model of what is culturally and symbolically valuable by posing a collection determined by people neither identified as nor professionalized as cultural experts. Hopefully, Group Material didn't instrumentalize or attempt to sociologically trace or distinguish a group. The aim was to construct a particular notion of what constitutes a public display.10 As a process The People's Choice was a concrete framework for working in the immediate neighborhood, drawing on its resources and providing something in return. As a representational space the exhibition was meant to render a portrayal of the block told through common objects, a community-based narrative of everyday life rather than one imposed by distanced experts.
An object displayed in a museum acquires an aspect of meaning and significance that was never intrinsic to is original purpose. Whether it is a Renaissance painting or a washboard, it has been taken out of its original context and , as Michael Brawne aptly puts it has become an: "icon", an object that deserves reverence because of its placement in this special settings. It happens to all museum objects, but the degree to which it occurs varies.11
There are, of course, calculated theatrics to all museum displays, even in the most ostentatiously austere of institutions.12
Not only the weight of a museological context positions what is contained therein as culturally significant, but for contemporary art, display is a form of discourse which inflects presented objects: spaciousness designated–as opposed to the crowded repetition-based arrangements of the common supermarket–communicates symbolic value and authority. Prevalent display strategies for the presentation of fine art utilize generous allocation of space to distinguish between art and "goods." Just as the white cube structure associated with art galleries provides an idealized setting in relief to the referential space of the "real world" including promotional culture which art is often purported to be apart from, the authority of uniqueness associated with art exhibition is readily appropriated in commercial settings. Why, at a Giorgio Armani store, is there often only a single suit in each style on display? Not because the store has only one suit in stock but because the way the merchandise is displayed has to be consistent with the message of the designers: that Armani suits are exclusive, that the Armani customer isn't going to run into another man wearing his suit every time he goes to an art opening at Gagosian.13
Group Material's first exhibition sited in a museum addressed hierarchical positionings of cultural production, including through display itself. The invitation was extended by curator Lisa Phillips from the Whitney Museum of American Art for the group[14] to participate in the 1985 Biennial by making a new installation. It was at that time extremely rare for artists without gallery representation or commercially circulating objects to be included in the Biennial, except within the film/video category. Since the Whitney Museum defines its biennial exhibition as a survey of the most significant recent art, its very structure raises questions about the effects of museum validation, the criteria for selection, the politics of inclusion and exclusion. In Group Material's view generally the Biennial expressed an overdetermined narrow vision of art practices and production, manifest as a greatest hits of what had been previously validated through sales in the commercial galleries, with a trade-fair environment, and didn't attend to broader definitions of cultural production or social contexts. Given that 1985 was the pinnacle of activity and interest in the East Village art scene and the differences represented therein from what was visible in Soho and on 57th Street, that year's Biennial attempted to be somewhat more inclusive than earlier versions. Hence, the invitation to Group Material among others.
With this context in mind we developed an exhibition titled Americana, and engaged critically with notions of what American culture is and how curatorial practices have supported a monolithic notion of American art. Group Material decided to make a model of our own biennial, a salon des refuses, of what was significantly absent, excluded through curatorial business-as-usual from the Whitney Museum. Americana took issue with the exclusivity and white-washed picture of American art proposed and supported by dominant cultural institutions such as the Whitney, and in a non-didactic manner opened curatorial practice to scrutiny. Americana included work by overtly socially engaged artists many of whom were women and artists of color, and popular "commercial artists" as well as store-bought objects from so-called low culture. One goal was to schematize some problematic relations with the art industry. Another was to link choices people might make when shopping with the decisions curators make when shopping on a grander scale for the museum's collection. The boundaries between "high" and "low" culture were symbolically dislodged in Americana. The exhibition aimed to be a catalyst for thinking about the function of cultural representation and icons and hierarchies of cultural production.
In terms of the look of the show, we wanted it to be dense and layered, viewed first as a whole (as democratic) rather than as discrete (autonomous) objects. We purchased a lot of Contact Paper, an inexpensive decorative self-adhesive wall paper, in diverse patterns, some more coded as "American." Strips of the patterned paper were laid like stripes from floor to ceiling, forming a ground of diverse designs upon which objects were hung. Over fifty artists' works were selected for inclusion, as well as products from supermarkets and department stores. Store-bought items were installed in groupings that demonstrated variation and "freedom of
choice." A television was hooked up which played regular broadcast programming continuously. A washing machine and dryer dominated center stage as the only other sculptural elements. A soundtrack made up of songs "representative of America" sampled from various genres was on continuous play. The total effect of Americana was over-stimulating with no space in the room left "neutral."
As consumers we visit exhibitions each time we enter stores to peruse the goods on display. We are used to visually scanning and interpreting in supermarkets and stores where no inch of retail space is left unfilled, untreated or unreferential. In 19th century European painting salons wall-space was schematized. The positions objects were assigned on a wall and within the salon as a whole, had symbolic meanings and consequences outside the exhibition hall. In Americana space was densely instrumentalized distinct from the rest of the Biennial which, except for a couple installations, was installed on the standard fifty inch hanging line.
How did these two exhibitory entities cohabitate? How did Americana and the Biennial itself identify with each other and inflect respective readings? A cynical viewer might say Group Material's installation was eclipsed by the context and authority of the Biennial. Group Material viewed public institutions as platforms and places that we wanted to affect through participation. The coexistence of our "model biennial" and the official exhibition made visible the paradoxical character of such institutions, and such institution-specific practices.
In a review in the Village Voice weekly newspaper Kim Levin cited Americana as representative proof of the low level that art had sunk to. " If Group Material's titillating, weakly rebellious installation lacks the grubby strength of the Times Square Show nearly five years ago, it does provide a hook to hang this year's Biennial on: commodity time is here (...) It's nice that Group Material tried to outwit the Whitney curators with its laundry room, even if it ended up doing the dirty work for them."15 In the letter of response to the critic, published in the May 21, 1985 issue of The Village Voice, Group Material stated "Contrary to Kim Levin's assumptions, Group Material wasn't used by the Whitney to any greater extent than its resources and visibility were used by us to present a critical model of what we believe an American museum's biennial should be. (...)If you really want a "radical shakeup," why stop at the Biennial? The entire culture industry needs to be overhauled. Americana is but one small demonstration toward a program of cultural change. It was not designed for the Whitney, or for art critics, but for the large public which Levin contemptuously reduces to "students, tourists, novices, and art
investors."16
In 1988, after seeing Group Material's "AIDS & Democracy: A Case Study" at the Dia Art Foundation, curator Larry Rinder of the University of Berkeley in California invited Group Material to make another AIDS-related project. Given the urgencies relevant to AIDS and that by 1989 there had been ten years of the epidemic with severely inadequate public response, we determined a map of the interlocking conditions that transformed the epidemic into a crisis was a crucial absence from public discourse about AIDS.17 A picture of history was needed and seemed apt for an exhibition about, from, and nearby a context of AIDS. Keeping in mind the university population would be the primary audience, an information-heavy installation was produced.
AIDS Timeline was envisioned as a textual and pictorial chronologically structured exhibit about the development of the AIDS crisis. A timeline in which the chronological format is in itself a guiding operation and orientation for viewers seemed an expedient organizing device for bringing into proximity seemingly incompatible information and material. The materials and information were presented not as disparate facts but as a web of intertwined events and association of ideas, in order to describe social processes and demonstrate that actions and events have consequences and interconnections with other actions and events. Within such an exhibition artworks being produced in relation to AIDS were contextualized. Research in several areas: medical and scientific industries; governmental statistics and policies; media representations of the AIDS crisis, particularly stigmatization of people with AIDS which linked representation to public opinion, allocations of resources, etc.; grassroots community and activist responses by affected communities was conducted by the group and research assistant Richard Meyer. Artifacts intended to mark cultural events (i.e. The Empire Strikes Back top-grossing movie of 1980) and catalyze memory in viewers were included in the display as well as artworks made by individuals and collectives. Information heavy exhibitions necessitate a deeper and longer commitment from viewers than normally given. Many people commented that AIDS Timeline should be a book but we disagreed–the project intended to be objective or objectified.
Although the timeline format at first glance promoted a linear reading, once one got into the material and the histories and stories being traced cross-referencing was inevitable. The arrangement of the art and artifacts chosen posited a history of the political and social conditions in which AIDS was allowed and encouraged to become a national crisis, and represented some exemplary responses to those circumstances. It also indicted the government and populace at large for its "inaction." Group Material's prefatory statement about the project read: Like any representation of history, this project is subjective in that it includes certain information and excludes other information. (...) The timeline documents the impact that homophobia, heterosexism, sexism, and racism have had on the formation of effective public policy. Virtually all the major social inequities that compromise democracy in the US are reflected in the decade-long history of AIDS.18
The three cases talked about above are a sampling of Group Material's exhibition practice in which we sought to challenge prescribed roles of artists and audience–producers and consumers. In addition, throughout Group Material's history we intermittently organized projects that took the exhibition form outside of institutional interiors one expects to see art in, and activated advertising spaces–in subway cars, on exterior building walls, in newspapers, on billboards. Such in-public projects as well as the interior exhibitions functioned as forums within which democratic schematics of culture were made.
One institutionally planned exhibit I experienced as a viewer warrants description and scrutiny. alt.youth.media, initiated and organized by Brian Goldfarb, Curator of Education at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, was exemplary in terms of an exhibition practice and consequent display. This was one of the few instances I'm aware of that a primary exhibition hall in a museum was given over to its education department. Typically, education programming is viewed as ancillary to curated exhibitions.
Staged in the fall of 1996, alt.youth.media was an exhibition of zines; web sites; CD-ROMs; audio, video and print projects by young media artists. Several video programs on continuous play at audio-visual stations were co-organized by Zoya Kocur and Stephanie Owens of the Educational Video Center. The exhibition design was made by a team of young people consisting of Julian Bevan, Robert Branch, Anne Frederick, Ann McDonald, Shaun Motley, Rio Valledor, and Zhoo Wen Li in collaboration with artist Judith Barry. The full list of participants and consultants is lengthy and includes names of individuals, groups, organizations and school & community programs.
The accompanying brochure written by Goldfarb announced "alt.youth.media brings together media works by youth, primarily teens and young adults, ranging from institutionally sanctioned media texts of videographers to more marginal productions of cyberpunks, riot grrrls, and zine editors." (...) "alt.youth.media demonstrates that young people working in these new media forms are not just creating isolated works of personal expression, but are forging a public space to collectively address "adult" issues such as family, sexuality, rape, domestic abuse, and suicide."
In alt.youth.media an amorphous community was evoked through bringing together young cultural producers' output, which with sophistication, humor, and insight conveyed the makers' relations to directives and portrayals expressed in mainstream media culture. Another unifying factor was the impetus of the participants to communicate exclusively in reproducible and distributable forms. Several subtexts threaded the show conceptually: awareness of media as a powerful tool; processes through which young–particularly urban–people's styles, habits, ways of being, passions, and responses to the world are endlessly instrumentalized and represented; and counter- and self-representations responding to the steady flow of images and myths about youth.
Upon entering alt.youth.media one crossed a threshold into a densely installed high-volume space. In the entry space of the museum photographs by Adrienne Salinger of teens in their densely decorated bedrooms were installed. They emblematically suggested that "a view from the inside" lay ahead. The first wall of the main space was layered with flyers, stickers, altered advertisements and magazine tear sheets which composed a combination information wall/ distribution site continuously added to over the duration of the exhibition. Nearby were other large-scale collages made from stickers of record and clothing labels, slogans, skateboard brands, group names, etc.
Within the architectural space-at-large, other spaces–audio, visual, electronic, and pictorial, unfolded. Topics such as family, violence, and sexuality were used to themetize stations at which visitors could watch videos, listen to music compilations on walkmans, and look through zines. Watching TV and listening to music became relatively private activities in the show's context so that numerous monitors and audio programs could coexist and be accessed simultaneously. Other ingredients in the installation were computer stations, a radio set-up for live broadcast, periodicals and books, video installations, a "history" wall, and seating.
One rather corny inclusion that proved to be surprisingly popular was a "make-your-own-zine" area equipped with copy machine and tools. Such manifestations which seek to include viewers through participatory means are increasingly typical in museum education.20 Of course attempts to symbolically "democratize" museums spring from various agendas and deploy a variety of devices, the most common and superficial being the provision of comment books for viewers to respond in. The recent shift in museum education along lines of "giving the viewer a voice" and community-based educational projects has been in symbiotic relation to increased funding for artistic and institutional practices that engage specific communities and publics. Such funding increases are influenced by decreases in subsidy for individual artists and art which serves no tangible social purpose. These funding trends are double-edged in that they encourage new kinds of socially engaged artistic practices: alt.youth.media's existence in The New Museum is no doubt in part possible due to such funding inclinations. Unfortunately few such education-based projects are as inventive or as productively inclusive, few offer such complex and entertaining descriptions of culture.
The exhibition structure of alt.youth.media and its spatialization encouraged particular kinds of experience: one might sit, as I did on numerous occasions, and listen to music, watch TV, leaf through publications and scan the room all at once. This reminded me of how I normally experience culture at home and in public, flipping from one medium
to another, interconnecting and layering things onto one another. The installation itself did not suggest a linear or otherwise clear path, but encouraged cross-referencing and making one's own way through. A criticism of "adolescent directionless21" was leveled at the exhibition by one commentator. This critique speaks of people's expectations and reliance on "the clearly marked path" as opposed to multiple paths, and on intermittent wall texts and other common features intended to situate viewers and tell them what their relation should be to the objects and materials shown.
Museums generally promote compartmentalizations of culture according to medium. That various media were not segregated from one another but were integrated into a synthesized environment was a significant effectivity of the exhibition. This synthesized environment was more akin to the source culture the materials came from: the display intelligently mirrored the larger social condition of media culture. In part because alt.youth.media was realized through discursive means and collaborations that included young cultural producers, it was a rare occasion when the usual modus operandi museums employ when dealing with "marginalized or subcultural" practices and products didn't utterly neutralize and distort the contents. One simple example of how neutralizing can occur is when museums insist on framing, putting in vitrines, or otherwise "protecting" all materials and artifacts. These simple devices–although appropriate for some circumstances–can also inappropriately create a surround of preciousness, and in the process, distance materials from their original contexts, functions. Although there are practical concerns raised when making an exhibition which contains ephemeral material and artifacts, most solutions utilized by institutions fail to effectively balance responsibilities between conservation and presentation. Rather, particular treatments functionally format anything and everything into the museum. Another neutralizing contrivance is the conventional display method mentioned earlier.
alt.youth.media demonstrated the creation by young people of alternative venues, distribution circuits, and forms influenced in part by concerns about portability, representational tools, and low-cost production. The show articulated a communicative field made by and for youth as means for affinities, and underscored that field's possibilities for personal and social agency. Cultural aesthetics as products of strategies for "public address" within a constantly proliferating media culture unified the show. On a symbolic level, difference became a connecting device in the exhibition: material variety was a structuring device. The exhibition as a whole embodied paradoxical relationships–between youth and media, between cultural critiques and cultural institutions.
It is worth noting that since alt.youth.media and similarly minded exhibitory enterprises, The New Museum has embarked on a different track which privileges more traditionally curated monographic exhibitions. This program is purported to be in the interest of re-engaging arts communities and funders who were perceived as alienated by the museum's predilection for "political art" and thematic exhibitions.
The examples discussed here suggest models of exhibition practice and models of exhibition structures which rely on collaborative conceptual interweaving: they share spatial arrangements that encourage cross-referencing and catalyze meanings within themetized fields.
It is important to attempt an understanding of what gets promoted and excluded by virtue of the way content is communicated in exhibitions themselves, and how those methods not only alter content but are content. The techniques and exhibition-making strategies by which art and artifacts are presented deliver particular readings of culture. One hazard of much exhibition-making lies in reductive selection and packaging which, by design, excludes the possibility for interconnection of ideas akin to social processes that are ordered differently than the order inherent in most museums and many museum exhibitions.
For me, there are two significant social sites inherent in the exhibition form: the political process of exhibition-making itself which reflects, represents, and produces particular social formations, and, the shared environments exhibitions are received in. As experiential systems, exhibitions are potentially rich discursive situations for presentation and theorization of ideas, communities and histories.
1. Mary Kelly, " Re-Viewing Modernist Criticism," Screen, 1981.
2. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum. History, theory, politics (London: Routledge, 1995).
3. Malcolm Gladwell, "The Science of Shopping," The New Yorker, November 4, 1996 "The Science of Shopping" is largely based on the work of Paco Underhill, founder of Environsell, a company engaged in market research in the field of retail anthropology. Paco Underhill compiles data about how people navigate retail space.
4. Larry Klein, Exhibits: Planning and Design (New York: Madison Square Press, 1986).
5. Judith Barry, "Dissenting Spaces," in Judith Barry: Public Fantasy (London: The Institute of Contemporary Art, 1991).
6. Susan Tallman, "Whose Art Is It, Anyway?," Art in America, June 1981.
7. see also Julie Ault, "The Double Edge of History," Springer, Fall 1997 for a discussion of the contexts that set the stage for Group Material's origins and work.
8. Hannah Alderfer, George Ault, Julie Ault, Patrick Brennan, Liliana Dones, Yolanda Hawkins, Beth Jaker, Mundy McLaughlin, Marybeth Nelson, Marek Pakulski, Tim Rollins, Peter Szypula, Michael Udvardy.
9. letter to residents of E.13th Street, January 1, 1981.
10. see also Thomas Lawson, "The People's Choice," review in Art Forum, April 1981.
11. Larry Klein, Exhibits: Planning and Design (New York: Madison Square Press, 1986).
12. Tallman, "Whose Art Is It, Anyway?"
13. Gladwell, "The Science of Shopping."
14. In 1985 Group Material consisted of Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Mundy McLaughlin, and Tim Rollins.
15. Kim Levin, "The Whitney Laundry," The Village Voice, April 9, 1985. Other reviews of Americana were more positive than Levin's, including Dan Cameron writing in the Summer '85 issue of Arts Magazine: "Like all good installations, Americana needed a lot of looking and contemplating, and actually required a form of attention that entirely transcends the normal experience of art. That this project could have occurred at all, much less with its integrity fully maintained, is as commendable a sign as we have ever seen of the Whitney's ultimate good intentions."
16. Group Material, letter to the editor, The Village Voice, May 21, 1985.
17. In 1991 Group Material was composed of Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Karen Ramspacher.
18. Group Material, artists' pages in 1991 Biennial Exhibition (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and W.W. Norton Company, 1991)
20. In the late 1980s and early 90s, under the direction of former Curator of Education Susan Cahan, The New Museum became renowned for spearheading progressive museum education programs that sought to engage viewers in more participatory manners than usual. Many such projects realized at The New Museum were substantive and groundbreaking in the larger discourse of museum education.
21. Howard Halle, Tonic Youth, Time Out, 9/18-25 1996.
Synopsis by Beth Peckman
Rather than talk about public space defined as outside museums and other institutions, Julie Ault's presentation focused on exhibition making as a medium encompassing curatorship. Ault and about 13 other young artists Co-founded Group Material, the NYC-based artists' collaborative, in 1979 out of frustration with the limited option for exercising the voices they had developed in school. Group Material addressed the inadequate means for art circulation, education, exhibition and distribution. Their original question was how to get the community or non-museum going people to museums and galleries.
Ault began by analyzing the exhibition limitations and options facing Group Material in the late seventies and early eighties. Recognizing similar strategies used in advertising and marketing as in exhibition curating and design was paramount for developing alternative exhibition modalities. Group Material saw increased cultural engagement at home by way of screen space (internet, TV, video), rather than in a shared public space capable of promoting dialogue, as a symptomatic shift, double-edged.
The disbursing of exhibitions placed in public spaces outside museums and galleries was one available response replete with dangers and benefits. The outcome depended upon the responsibility taken for interaction rather than intervention. Group Material's interest was to develop nontraditional curatorial methods within the experted venues for viewing art (i.e. museums), as well as in unexpected venues such as advertising spaces. These methods acknowledged curatorship as encompassing
display, audience, community (and how Public Relations
could attract diverse communities to the museum), and a need to foster interaction over intervention. Creating an open curatorial process to allow intentions to change was a formidable challenge.
Ault discussed nontraditional curatorial methods and gave specific examples. The "Peoples' Choice," a project within Group Material's first year of activities, was an eclectic collection of everyday objects from block residents (E 13th St., where GM had its space for one year). The intent was to interrogate the traditional institutional sense of what constitutes a display of what is culturally valued. This exhibition represented real rather than imposed reality. Initially, letters to members of the community yielded almost no response. This prompted interactive, door-to-door visits. Word of mouth peer pressure was also effective.
"Americana," a 1985 exhibition ran concurrently with the Whitney Biennial. It consisted of works by 50 artists, store bought and kitsch items, and household appliances. They wanted to imitate the supermarket aesthetic, rejecting the use of spacing between objects as an indication of importance. Group Material sought to effect the platform of museum participation and to question the very nature of the Biennial institutionalization.
"AIDS Time Line" was originated in 1989 for the Berkeley Museum and was later reconfigured in Hartford at the Wadsworth Museum and 1991 Whitney Biennial. Each incarnation had a different "look" and contained different information based on the exhibiting community. Group Material interspersed textual and pictorial content based on AIDS information about the local, as well as national, community with significant time markers such as major movie release posters. The dense arrangement created a web of associations. Group Material declined making the exhibition into a book. They valued the ephemeral nature of the exhibition over the notion of an object, feared that a book was not expansive, and therefore too dangerous a context.
Ault also cited "Alt-Youth Media", an alternative exhibition which she did not participate in but strongly responded to its curatorial approach. She noted that the educational department, and not the art department, organized this densely installed, multimedia exhibition at the New Museum in 1996. The focus was younger artists steeped in popular culture. This high-volume space was complex, entertaining and held multiple levels of meanings. Difference, rather than similarity, became the vehicle for connections in this exhibition realized through collaboration, interaction, inclusion and discursiveness.
Ault's main concerns when curating an exhibition are responding to a set of circumstances as a political process directed toward creating shared environments.
Analysis by George Kimmerling
Group Material’s 1981 The People’s Choice exhibition and the 1996 alt.youth.media at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, both of which Ault discussed in her presentation, disrupted traditional notions of art exhibitions. Taken as model strategies, however, these shows offer substantively different challenges to museum and gallery curatorial, collection and display practices. The differences are important, as Ault premised her remarks on her understanding of exhibitions as a medium that always advocates a position regarding art and material culture.
In The People’s Choice, Group Material (of which Ault was a founding member) challenged the perceived elitism of art institutions by asking residents living on the same block as the organization’s East 13th Street storefront exhibition space to donate personal collectibles and other household items for the exhibition. Thus, as Ault pointed out, the show created and gave back to the community a narrative about the residents and tried to break down the barriers between cultural production and representation.
By creating a densely packed show in a storefront, Group Material also intended to draw a comparison between museums and other commercial establishments such as grocery stores and shopping malls. The exhibition examined the valuation and packaging for sale of objects collected and displayed, whether art objects or Grade A steaks.
By comparison, alt.youth.media, as Ault noted, was planned by and exhibited within a museum located in Soho. Formally, as Ault described it, this exhibition shared with The People’s Choice a dense display and variety of material, including ‘zines, CD ROMs, video, photos and text. Both shows, then, allowed viewers to experience a set of cultural objects in a nonlinear manner, avoiding the hierarchical presentation and cherishing of art, that can occur in traditional museums. Moreover, like The People’s Choice, alt.youth.media attempted to portray a community through objects it had created and, at the New Museum, that it continued to create in the museum during the run of the show.
But, while both shows critiqued traditional exhibition strategies, they offered different levels of critique. The People’s Choice was a grassroots exhibition, in which the curators put out a call for everyday objects owned by local residents and displayed the resulting collection without judgments about quality or appropriateness. The show was sited within a lower-income neighborhood in an area that was not known for art exhibitions, on the cusp of gentrification processes in the Lower East Side. In addition, commercial storefronts were not traditional art spaces.
Museums are. Ault noted that museums first were created for a new moneyed class interested in viewing fine art and exotic objects and in self-cultivation. The museum provided both. These days, however, with middle-class flight from urban areas, museums have been abandoned by their traditional constituency(*), Ault said, and are setting up retail operations, blockbuster shows, technologically imaginative presentations and community outreach programs to lure audiences.
The New Museum exhibition could be seen as an outgrowth of these strategies perhaps as easily as it could a foray into critical museum practice. Exhibiting a show about youth culture in the heart of Soho in 1996 might critique the commodity culture of museums, but it could so closely approximate the youth-centered commercialism of part of Soho (including the stretch of Broadway where the museum is located) that any critique is lost.
Certainly, an exhibition that displays youth culture would benefit from the contemporary fascination with and fetishizing of youth, and might create only an ethnographic display rather than a community-based narrative. Even Ault was critical of the exhibition’s community participation program, in which visitors could create their own ‘zines, as a conservative example of what museum outreach programs can be.
Group Material disbanded in the early 1990s with the election of President Clinton and the seemingly more liberal attitudes the new administration was thought to promise. Although the current political climate probably won’t support the rebirth of a similar venture, museum exhibitions such as alt.youth.media, however innovative, may never provide a fully sufficient model for critiquing traditional exhibition strategies.
(*) traditional constituency was not necessarily middle, but upper or bourgeois class. This is the constituency that is not as coherent and dominant. (Ault's note)