The evolution of the gallery as archive.

In the digital age of computers, the Internet and social media, we are met with an abundance of data across a plethora of platforms. As such, the call for a taxonomic system of identification and arrangement of information, is one whose requirement is self-evident, and whose application is essential for navigating contemporary culture. Essayist and critical theorist Theodor Adorno observed that by addressing culture one must also consider in some capacity the act of administration (2010, p107). The need for an administrative top-down system is most apparent when one considers the vast array of variables lacking in a common denominator, comprising our present culture, so that we may in turn gather, synthesise and arrange information to cultivate that which is useful from the overwhelming supply of that which is not.

It necessarily follows that much of what constitutes our current social discourse revolves around the activity of information management. In particular, utilising the tools and technologies at our disposal to enable us to preserve accessibility, as inevitable advancements continue to transform these established administrative processes and procedures. Yet though progressive, innovative technologies may satisfy the capitalist agenda of increasing productivity whilst actively consolidating and reducing manual labour, the need for an agglomeration of different spheres of high and low culture into rigidly defined categories in order for them to operate successfully, brought with it the unavoidable threat of eliminating the autonomy of singular works, in favour of mass-produced and mass-accessible goods. For the art world, this imperilled centuries of tradition and ritual which celebrated the distinct abilities and talents of the individual artisan.

Within capitalist societies throughout the twentieth century, the role of the artisanal craftsman became subject to scrutiny, as improvements to reproductive technologies steadily encroached and replaced much of what was bound up in the act of manual production, and ultimately its economic value as a commodity – serving as a rare collectible, or unique object of curiosity. This concern was addressed by the critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin in his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in which he postulates that, although historically man has always been able to recreate that which he has previously manufactured for both educational practice and as a means of further circulating his work with a view to return a profit, (Benjamin, 2008, p3); mechanical reproduction constitutes a devaluing of the idiosyncratic, authoring qualities of the original work, which he refers to throughout the essay as the “aura” of the work.

For Benjamin, the conditions that contribute not only to the work’s physical development by the application of both knowledge and expertise of craftsmanship, but also the story of the artwork’s coming into being, and subsequent ownership – a heritage of sorts – provide it with an authority that in turn creates the auric qualities that would become lost in any replication. He writes that ‘even with the most perfect reproduction, one thing stands out: the here and now of the work of art – its unique existence in the place where it is at this moment.’ (Benjamin, 2008, p5). Each copy of the work manufactured has no historicity prior to the machine from which it is duplicated, causing not only the authoring qualities of the original to be altered, but also, through duplication, a loss of the original’s unique authenticity, a reduction of its value as an object of significance, and as a commodity.

Citing Benjamin, Krauss believes that it is inevitable that to an ever greater extent, that which is reproduced becomes that which is made to be reproducible (1999, p46). The result of this is that the content and materials of the works lose their significance in order to enter into what Krauss terms the ‘condition of general equivalency’, a position from which the idiosyncratic qualities of individual works become flattened, and ultimately replaced by a universal interchangeability. This homogenisation allows for the complete commodification of all sociocultural entities, which become able to move freely between different branches of the larger system of culture, and so can occupy multiple definitions simultaneously depending on how they are ordered and presented. For the art world, freed from the constraints of medium specificity, it presented opportunities for new media such as film and video to be used to produce works that could transcend the bourgeois sphere, and begin to invite a wider audience into its enclave.

One may argue that by including time-based media into the gallery, the art world began to assimilate a rhetoric of interdisciplinary sites of display, breaking down its own traditions of presentation in order to enable new media to integrate into what may now be considered the contemporary exhibition. The coalescence of such mass-accessible time-based media enabled art to begin operating within a language of interchangeable, adaptable manifestations, which could permit global manoeuvrability to transcend social spheres, and in doing so, begin to create new iterations of socio-economic value. Badonivac observes that the inclusion of such reproducible, mass-oriented media allowed public access to art in museums and galleries to significantly expand within the previous century, offering a more ‘democratised’ art world, which altered not only the production of art, but also its consumption (2010, p153).

Whilst the transformative qualities of reproductive media altered the way the individual artwork may have been perceived, one could also assert that it went deeper, changing the entire definition of the act of viewing, in order to best serve its own agenda. Weber expounds that ‘aura thrives in its decline, and that the reproductive media are particularly conducive to this thriving,’ (1996, p101) so that, rather than oppose reproduction and replication, these new media permit consumption that actively promotes and reinforces it.

The contemporary exhibition, therefore, resolves to place less emphasis on the artist as creator, and more on the viewer as consumer. As such, art within the contemporary exhibition began to further employ the language of capitalism, changing the passivity of the viewer into an active agent, a user of culture, and in doing so enabled them to fulfil their duty as the consumer of cultural commodities. These commodities may serve as ‘exchangeable information or status symbols… consumers now trade the intangible social markers of gallery-attendance for the prestige these markers confer on them in the socio-economic marketplace’. (Cook, 1996, p31) Culture becomes diluted into the distinguishing identifiers of some form of social operation, that in turn becomes useable, becomes exchangeable.

One of the consequences of this, however, is that the artwork and its framing device have become inextricably fused. Particularly since the 1960’s it can be said that art and the exhibition evolved such that contemporary art requires presentation if it is to be at all comprehensible, (Nairne, 1999, p105) and it is evident in the emergence of time-based and new media into the gallery that the concomitant role of the framing device is key to this transformation. Video, for example, contrary to its conventional display across mass broadcasting platforms, was in exhibitions ‘assimilated by downplaying its utopian social criticism and aspirations to wide participation and distribution in favour of splicing it with installation to make comforting, museum-based objects reminiscent of painting or sculpture.’ (Stallabrass, 2006, pp85-86). Borrowing from social conventions in order to negate inherent social qualities through its oppositional stance towards them, the media became revealed through its own presentation: the projector became as significant as the content it projected.

Indeed the site of display may be considered to ‘reveal’ both the artwork and its apparatus, as ‘if traditional art required artisanal supports of various kinds… contemporary art makes use of technical supports… to which it then makes recursive reference, in the manner of modernist art’s reflex of self-criticism.’ (Krauss, 2013, p142). Through the unraveling of the equipment, and combinations of framing devices, the gallery space became opened up into a site of interactivity, and of multiple temporalities, allowing time-based media to integrate into collections, alongside traditional plastic media.

Thus is may be suggested that the framing device is the necessary element that invests artistic value into the works, which, in an era of post-media, are poised in transpositional flux. It enables the viewer to consume the work as a cultural commodity by bringing it into the time of the consumer, as something that can be accessed, whilst also permitting the language of its presentation to retain artistic integrity through the work’s institutionalisation.

As Acconci explains:

‘Video installation is the conjunction of opposites… On the one hand, ‘installation’ places an art-work in a specific site, for a specific time (a specific duration and also, possible, for a specific historical time). On the other hand, ‘video’ (with its consequences followed through: video broadcast on telelvision) is placeless: at least, its place can’t be determined… Video installation, then, places placelessness.’ (2007, p122).

Though outwardly appearing to the masses to suppress the rigidity of the bourgeois sphere that had kept art largely away from public consumption, on a deeper level Badonivac also suggests that the art wold retained some autonomy as it effectively changed its currency to one of the language of the institution. It can be argued that despite its new apparent accessibility, the institutionalisation of the art world ensured it still remained in-part ambiguous to those without the necessary experience and education to reflect critically on it, whom critical theorists including Horkheimer and Adorno believed would be satisfied with the aforementioned socio-economic value exchanged in visiting the gallery provides, without requirement for deeper understanding or further discussion.

Through what is widely referred to as “institutional critique”, today’s universities, art schools, and galleries work to amass an academically recognised knowledge, based upon a language of theory and criticism, which maintains the exclusivity and status of the art profession. (Stallabrass, 2006, p81). If we consider then, that nowadays, ‘high culture relies on an ideology of framing and the pedestal, on the exact delineation of the objects it promotes, enshrined in categories and regulated by codes of presentation,’ (Bourriaud, 2002, pp41-42) it is possible to see how such a language thrives within the loci of the temporary exhibitions and interconnected displays of contemporary galleries.

With the heightened awareness of a curation within exhibitions, matched by an equally critical understanding of what constitutes the act of curation itself, galleries presented exhibitions at the behest of any “aesthetic autonomy” of the works on display. It rather ‘subjected art to a reconditioning of its meaningfulness within the exhibition context.’ (O’Neill, 2002, p31). The singular work of art was transposed into an esoteric language of art, through which the travelling or temporary collective exhibitionary form and institutionalised art space became the vessel for new contextualisation and facilitation.

As users of culture, we are essentially conditioned to define objects based on their outwards relationship to the society of our time, which is translated through the framing device, something that Bourriaud would hold to be a cipher for decoding artworks so that they may transpose and transcend across the wider lexicon of culture. To this extent, it enables artists to continue operating with an autonomy in some way, by ensuring art’s oppositional stance towards the rest of society. Bourriaud (2002, p40) maintains that through a subtle system of semiotics, indexes, signs and signifieds, the work weaves its own path into the tapestry of culture, and that these appropriations allow for further connections to be made. In replacing the permanence of the museum art collection with the temporary exhibition, which in itself provided a means for the gallery to introduce its own timelines and historicity, these exhibitions were subsequently able to be rearranged, re-presented, and redefined for new audiences each time, finding new ways to bring the works back to a point of confluence with present society.

If, as Bourriaud writes, the aura of art ‘no longer lies in the hinter-world represented by the work, nor in form itself, but in front of it, within the temporary collective form that it produces by being put on show,’ (2002, p61) then the transformation of the gallery into an archive, and thus a site of multiple temporalities, and interchangeable timelines, would be a necessary condition for aura to again thrive.

The qualities originally lamented by Benjamin, now detached from individual works, may instead be said to reside within the ephemerality of the temporary show itself. Contingent to this is a requirement for the temporary collection to be shown. People have to travel to the gallery, or to the site of installation, in order to experience it, and the more accessible the artwork appears, the more it will be viewed, documented and otherwise preserved. Indeed it could be said that it is in the exhibition, the single point of contact between the immobile artwork, and the mobile viewer, that art only becomes contemporary through the discussions and debates that it raises, and from here that any formal discussions surrounding art may be absorbed into the knowledge base of the institution.

Since their inception, temporary exhibitions have enabled galleries and museums to selectively group and present works adjacent to, and in conjunction with, their own timelines, essentially producing their own heritage. Operating as an archival system, galleries are now able to marshal their contents so they can be rearranged in order to permit them to adapt and reintegrate into active society. Archiving in itself is of time and also beyond time, and so sits comfortably alongside the ever increasing flux of information, whilst linear, historical time (previously the dominant form of taxonomy in museums) is suppressed to become just another attribute. The archive is not only for stockpiling and ordering information of the past, but rather, the archiving system also lays out the structure of what may be considered archivable content from its very point of creation. The act of archivisation determines as well as captures the event, (Derrida, 1995, pp16-17) and so the archive’s role grants it the additional security of not only choosing what and how information can be stored now, but also of being able to carve its own trajectory to influence what can be produced in future.

Acting as an archive, the institutionalised gallery therefore ‘imposes precise regulation on inbound and outbound communication. It only accepts what fits its format and procedures.’ (Heidenreich, 2010, p71). In order to maintain this autonomising process, and as a vital part of institutionalised art, curation invests value to the art by means of presentation and inciting academic debate. Through overseeing the location and context for new displays of art, and by forging new connections therein, the curator follows the archival route of redefining art’s prescribed means of production, while still asserting its place within the conditions of the exhibition. (O’Neill, 2012, p28).

The task of cultural administration is inescapably bound to the society in which it exists, and is facilitated through organising and rearranging sociocultural distinctions by translating them into a universally manageable language. Within capitalist societies, the result of this is the reduction and commodification of all forms into a socioeconomically charged language that confers upon them value and exchangeability. The linear timeline of the traditional gallery no longer served as the sole means of arrangement, as time itself became reduced to one of many attributes, and was likewise subject to commodification. The apparent issue presented by this was not one of storage, but of accessibility, and in operating as an archive the gallery was able to detach itself from historical stasis, in order to facilitate access to a multiplicity of interweaving timelines and temporalities, through repeat rearrangements of artworks within the context of the interchangeable display of the exhibition. Through institutional critique art managed to create a form of autonomy that ensured its protection from complete absorption into mass culture, whilst permitting its mass-consumption in the form of sociocultural value. In this so-called “culture of use”, artworks become the temporary terminals that punctuate overlapping social narratives. They are able to be reinterpreted and reapplied within each new social iteration and so each exhibition permits within itself, multiple possible future interpretations, within which the individual artwork’s contribution is but one of many.

Bibliography:

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