Exhibition

Artistic Practice

Contemporary

Conditions

Terms:

Unlearning Prompt: visualize unlearning

Prompt: "visualize unlearning", made with Ideogram, January 2025

Maj Ørskov: "Since, in the context of the artistic practices that interest me, the practice of unlearning relates directly to the production, circulation and instrumentalization of knowledge, I also find the concept of unlearning to be a key methodological stance to think, write and practice through when interacting analytically with these works." Continue reading

Thinking, writing, practicing in circles All the steps towards an image generated with Stable Diffusion XL and the prompt "Thinking, writing, practicing in circles"

All the steps towards an image generated with Stable Diffusion XL and the prompt "Thinking, writing, practicing in circles", January 2025.

Maj Ørskov: "we, researchers of contemporary art, are forced not just to work progressively in line with the history of art, when composing a problem or object of analysis, but to work in circles across the analytic material that we find of relevance." Continue reading

Reflexive transformation An image generated with the prompt "The aesthetic is political". The red dots show the zones of the image activated by the word "political" in the prompt. The visualization is created using DAAM, March 2025.

An image generated with the prompt "The aesthetic is political". The red dots show the zones of the image activated by the word "political" in the prompt. The visualization is created using DAAM, March 2025.

Jacob Lund: "The aesthetic is political precisely because of its ability to differentiate itself from the normally inconspicuous organization of our everyday lifeworld, and, through such differentiation, provoke critical reflection on this organization — which is what makes a certain degree of exhibition of decisive importance.[2]" Continue reading

Maj Ørskov: "I want to ask what consequences this implied precedence of reflexivity over more bodily circumstances has for the analytic potential of the term. In Rebentisch’s and Lund’s writing on the phenomenon, I find a lack of reflections regarding the more “practical” or "material" (in lack of better words) dimensions of reflexive transformation. Under which spatial-temporal conditions can an intense exchange between an interpreting subject and a sensemaking object come to qualify as reflexive transformation?" Continue reading

Reality/virkelighed Prompt: visualize reality

Prompt: visualize reality, made with Ideogram, January 2025

Jacob Lund: "Reality is constituted by what is at work, virker, in the world; by what is in operation, what operates; and by what has effects and informs our perception and understanding of the world. The artistic practices in question here operate in and on reality and demonstrate that the reality of the world, virkeligheden, is negotiable and can be made to work, virke, otherwise." Continue reading

Planetarity Prompt: visualize planetary entanglement

Prompt: visualize planetary entanglement, made with Ideogram, January 2025

Jacob Lund: "Entering the anthropocene epoch influences our very perception of time. Hence, we are not only dealing with a new epoch replacing an old one, the Holocene, in a process of linear progressive development – which in the case of the Earth spans more than 4,5 billion years, a time scale that is highly abstract to our human perception. The new epoch is also accompanied by an increasing need for us to relate to a planetary scale, according to which we, as inhabitants of the same Earth, globally and across our cultural differences and national histories, share the same historical now, the same present." Continue reading

Ordinary research A composite image showing tthe zones activated by different words in the prompt.

A composite of four images generated with the prompt "to understand the different processes and gestures which together constitute ordinary analysis within art research today" by Stable Diffusion. On the left top, the red and yellow zones represent the parts of the image most affected by the term "art". On the top right, the zones affected by the term "and". On the bottom row, the red and yellow zones represent the parts affected by the terms "ordinary" and "research" respectively. March 2025.

Maj Ørskov: "Consequently, I would say that the core practice of humanistic research in general, and particularly the core practice of art research, is analysis. However, I find that we have a relatively poor language to understand the different processes and gestures which together constitute ordinary analysis within art research today." Continue reading

Institutions/ dependencies/ entanglement Prompt: visualize institutions/ dependencies/ entanglement

Prompt: visualize institutions/ dependencies/ entanglement, made with Ideogram, January 2025

Nicolas Malevé: "Art is not only art and its methods proliferate outside of its traditional remits under the constraint of an external factor. The art school inundates the art world and a majority of trained artists are excluded from the art market (or who refuse to join it or abide by its rules, a combination of all that). This population is not just an army of reserve for the art world or art education. They learn other professions, they are “reconverted”. Continue reading

Historicity A composite image showing tthe zones activated by different words in the prompt.

A composite of two images generated with the prompt "a global interconnection of different presents" by Stable Diffusion. On the left, the red zones represent the parts of the image most affected by the term "interconnection". On the right, the zones affected by the term "present". March 2025.

Jacob Lund: "What I find crucial about our present, the present present, is that it is conditioned by con-temporaneity, understood as a global interconnection of differentpresents, with different pre-histories, and of different time-experiences. It is an idea of contemporaneity as a, at least in principle, shared present across divisive cultural and historical differences; of a temporary unity of the present across the planet." Continue reading

Flammability Synthetic image showing disguised protesters in front of an art institution in flames

Prompt: Amateurish photo of the new york modern museum of art in flames contrast between the white building and the flames at night with a crowd of disguised artists demonstrating, generated with Flux Schnell, March 2025.

Nicolas Malevé: "Indeed the consequences of the perilous exercise of pleasing collectors and donors whilst decolonizing the collection offers the perfect fetish to the alt right that never tires to denounce the hypocrisy of the left and their secret alliance to the elite. Whilst museums are in a perfect trap, the institutions that sought to give structural room of manoeuvre to progressive projects, such as the recent documenta, are not in a better place." Continue reading

Exhibition A composite image that shows a synthetic image and the vizualisation of the zones where a word in the prompt has significant effect.

Image: On the left, an image generated with Stable Diffusion 1.4 and the prompt "a certain openness in regard to sense". On the right, a visualization of the parts of the image (in yellow and red pixels) which correspond to the zones activated by the word "regard" in the prompt. March 2025.

Jacob Lund: "The act of showing, displaying, exhibiting and demonstrating something, is an indispensable part of the manifestation of any work of art – contemporary as well as modern – and hence a condition for its being perceived and experienced. This is not yet, however, what makes the thing being shown art or an aesthetic object, be it physical or not. What makes it artistic, or at least aesthetic, is a certain openness with regard to the sense or signification of the thing that appears, which ignites a process of reflexivity that, ultimately, is a negotiation of the world and how we live in it." Continue reading

Diagramming Prompt: visualize diagramming

Prompt: visualize diagramming, made with Ideogram, January 2025

Nicolas Malevé: "The practice of diagramming requires the unlearning of expected positions, working against my initial assumptions. To undo a certain image of the controversy that I have in mind when I encounter a situation." Continue reading

Critical assemblage Prompt: visualize critical assemblage

Prompt: visualize critical assemblage, made with Ideogram, January 2025

Nicolas Malevé: "Critical assemblage presumes that to critique is not simply to formulate an argument against something or someone. It is to assemble the conditions for a critique to be formulated and be listened to as much as to formulate an argument. These conditions are not determined by the subject who formulates the critique alone. This means that the locus of the critique is distributed." Continue reading

Contemporary conditions All the steps to generate a synthetic image

All the steps towards an image generated with Stable Diffusion XL and the prompt "an aesthetics that includes more-than-human agents", March 2025.

Jacob Lund: "We are in need of developing an aesthetics that includes more-than-human agents and recognises that we are bound to Earth and inescapably entangled in its dynamic being, but without letting go of human responsibility and political agency." Continue reading

Composition Prompt: visualize composition

Prompt: visualize composition, made with Ideogram, January 2025

Maj Ørskov: "I am aware that the practice of composition as laid out here contributes to further expose the fundamental fragility and unprovability of our knowledge production systems, but I say: wonderful!" Continue reading

Nicolas Malevé: "To compose an object then requires to move across all the layers of this problem. To strategically contribute to the general economy of attention, to work on the conditions of discernibility. And be reflexive about the implications of making visible and discernible." Continue reading

Autonomy

Prompt: visualize artistic autonomy, made with Ideogram, January 2025

Jacob Lund: "My assumption is that we, if we are to talk about artistic autonomy today, should talk about the autonomy of a particular form of practice and the experiential process that is related to this practice, rather than the autonomy of a given object-based work or the subject position of the artist as autonomous." Continue reading

Aesthetic/Artistic practice Prompt: visualize what aesthetic practice is

Prompt: visualize what aesthetic practice is, made with Ideogram, January 2025

Jacob Lund: "Thus, artistic aesthetic practice is not only a particular way of engaging with the sensuous world, but also involves the production of aesthetic reflective perception. In artistic practice the production of aesthetic perception is addressed to a public. In this sense, an artistic aesthetic practice proper involves the invitation of an audience, a public, to take part in the process of sensing and sense-making." Continue reading

Unlearning Prompt: visualize unlearning

Prompt: "visualize unlearning", made with Ideogram, January 2025

Thinking, writing, practicing in circles All the steps towards an image generated with Stable Diffusion XL and the prompt "Thinking, writing, practicing in circles"

All the steps towards an image generated with Stable Diffusion XL and the prompt "Thinking, writing, practicing in circles", January 2025.

Reality/virkelighed Prompt: visualize reality

Prompt: visualize reality, made with Ideogram, January 2025

Planetarity Prompt: visualize planetary entanglement

Prompt: visualize planetary entanglement, made with Ideogram, January 2025

Ordinary research A composite image showing tthe zones activated by different words in the prompt.

Institutions/ dependencies/ entanglement Prompt: visualize institutions/ dependencies/ entanglement

Prompt: visualize institutions/ dependencies/ entanglement, made with Ideogram, January 2025

Historicity A composite image showing tthe zones activated by different words in the prompt.

Flammability Synthetic image showing disguised protesters in front of an art institution in flames

Exhibition A composite image that shows a synthetic image and the vizualisation of the zones where a word in the prompt has significant effect.

Diagramming Prompt: visualize diagramming

Prompt: visualize diagramming, made with Ideogram, January 2025

Critical assemblage Prompt: visualize critical assemblage

Prompt: visualize critical assemblage, made with Ideogram, January 2025

Contemporary conditions All the steps to generate a synthetic image

All the steps towards an image generated with Stable Diffusion XL and the prompt "an aesthetics that includes more-than-human agents", March 2025.

Composition Prompt: visualize composition

Prompt: visualize composition, made with Ideogram, January 2025

Autonomy

Prompt: visualize artistic autonomy, made with Ideogram, January 2025

Aesthetic/Artistic practice Prompt: visualize what aesthetic practice is

Prompt: visualize what aesthetic practice is, made with Ideogram, January 2025

A Situated Terminology

Aesthetic/artistic practice

Autonomy

Composition

Contemporary conditions

Critical assemblage

Diagramming

Exhibition

Flammability

Historicity

Institutions/ dependencies/ entanglement

Ordinary research

Planetarity

Reality/ virkelighed

Reflexive transformation

Reflexive transformation/ destabilization

Thinking, writing, practicing in circles

Unlearning

by Jacob Lund

Authored: 12 Oct 2024. Last edit: 20 Dec 2024

Exhibition

Lucy Steeds interestingly suggests – with reference to Walter Benjamin's notions of Ausstellbarkeit [fitness, or capacity, for exhibition, or its exhibitionability] and Ausstellungswert [exhibition value] in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” – to analyze art based on its exposability, understood as “its capacity to produce sociopolitical entanglement.”[1] In contrast to most modern works of art, a contemporary work of art is often distributed across different instantiations, elements and appearances. In socially engaged art practices, for example, the events by which the work of art becomes public may be distributed across time and space: social interactions in physical spaces with and without an audience; online and offline texts, films, photos, interviews, and different kinds of documentation that function as an integral part of the work rather than “extra-diegetic” representations of it.[2]

Steeds connects her notion of exposability to the German term Darstellung, which shares its root with Ausstellung in the verb stellen (to place), but which is more oriented toward a taking-place, something that is activated situationally. According to Steeds, the exposing or staging of art implies a shift from display to a process of collective imagination or social action and points to the continued actuality of Benjamin's aesthetic thinking: “Exposability, underscored by Darstellung as much as Ausstellung, insists that art operates in concert with the circumstances in which it is encountered – situationally, historically, and geopolitically. We might say that it proves conscious of the exhibitionary context, of the situation of exposure, so that it both magnifies and is magnified by the particular and transitory here-and-now – operating through the commons temporarily convened, with future chapters in other settings to be experienced and debated distinctly.”[3] The act of showing, displaying, exhibiting and demonstrating something, is an indispensable part of the manifestation of any work of art – contemporary as well as modern – and hence a condition for its being perceived and experienced. This is not yet, however, what makes the thing being shown art or an aesthetic object, be it physical or not. What makes it artistic, or at least aesthetic, is a certain openness with regard to the sense or signification of the thing that appears, which ignites a process of reflexivity that, ultimately, is a negotiation of the world and how we live in it. In other words, there is a decisive difference between exhibition as presentation of an object or phenomenon “as it is” (non-artistic; matter of fact), and exhibition as presentation of an object or phenomenon as an object of reflection that sparks a process of sense-making or a renegotiation of the meaning/sense the object is generally attributed, that is, as a matter of concern. The latter is a socialising image practice (see aesthetic/artistic practice) which creates what Eyal Weizman calls an “open verification” where “[v]erification relates to truth not as a noun or as an essence, but as a practice, one that is contingent, collective, and poly-perspectival.”[4]

Contemporary artistic practices increasingly destabilise the border between art and non-art in endeavours to address urgent questions about climate change, migration, violence, human rights, decolonization, racism, sexism, etc.[5] The destabilisation of the border between art and non-art, between art and political reality, of course, also involves the ways in which these practices are exhibited and our art theoretical notions of “exhibition.” According to Kim West’s reading of Jean Davallon, “an exhibition creates a separate symbolic space, but one featuring ‘real’ objects rather than representations [...] the exhibited objects always retain a connection to their ‘external’ reality, transcending their adherence to the exhibition's symbolic dimension.”[6] My point is that the double articulation of the objects as real and symbolic through an act of exhibition is a decisive element in making a negotiation of reality possible. The act of exhibition makes something/the work present but, at the same time, it creates a distance, precisely because the appearance of the work has been arranged and addressed to someone/us; what is exhibited is given as having been organised and deliberately made available to appear to us.[7] This distance to the object presented installs a difference and an indeterminacy with regard to its status and meaning/sense. In the language of Jacques Rancière, the object becomes a pensive image in a zone of indeterminacy between passive representation and active operation, between non-art and art.[8] The creation of such difference and indeterminacy is what allows for a reflexive transformation and questioning of the status quo, of hegemonic, authoritative narratives about the world and what is.

For a while now we have been thinking about exhibitions as that through which (most) art becomes known.[9] According to Bruce W. Ferguson, “exhibitions of art are, by virtue of their visible prominence, structurally intrinsic and perhaps psychologically necessary to any full understanding of most art. Exhibitions can be understood then as the medium of contemporary art in the sense of being its main agency of communication.”[10] In addition, West stresses that exhibitions are the media of art’s public realisation: “as media, art exhibitions should be conceived of as affirmative in their mediating functions. They are the spatial and technical arrangements through which artworks are publicly realized.”[11]

The question, then, is, what constitutes an exhibition? Does it have to take on a more or less institutionalized form, in a space or at a site dedicated to art, like the ones Ferguson writes about? What is the relationship between the work of art and its exhibition? Are they still distinguishable? When does the exhibition of a work of art begin? When does a work of art become “an object of appreciation” (in the terminology of George Dickie’s institutional theory of art)?[12] I am in many ways sympathetic to Ferguson’s analogy between an exhibition of art and an utterance or a set of utterances and to his proposal to see the art exhibition as the speech act of an institution, but what I am after here is not “how art serves exhibitions as their very element of speech.”[13] I am interested in “the public realization” of art both within and beyond the authoritative art museum institution, as I see the work of art as being inescapably bound to an act of exhibition, a making-public. In other words, an element of exhibition is an integral part of the very concept of the work of art. It is not something that is added later. It is produced through the work of art's mode and structure of address.

I argue that the exhibition form is constitutive of the work of art. Any work of art has a structure of address – an Appellstruktur in the terminology of Wolfgang Iser – that informs the ways in which it can be received.[14] It is thus, in a fundamental way, addressing and exposing itself to a public of indefinite strangers.[15] Subsequently, the curator can make it address a public at another level and in any given context, but the first moment of exhibition already occurs in and through the address of the work “itself” – a work of art always already involves an act of exhibition in its initial address to someone, a you, an audience, readers, listeners, spectators, participants, collaborators. It is open to be “received” by anybody who is able to enter into its structure of enunciation, and who will actualize or concretize it.

Challenges to conventional forms of presenting art and its ideas to the public, guided by ideologies of modernity, have become more and more fundamental since the 1960s. We therefore need to revise some of the basic notions and categories through which we understand art, in order to bring our theories up to speed with contemporary artistic practice. On the other hand, we should not lose sight of the exhibitionary aspect of art as that aspect is still, I claim, one of the defining characteristics of art: when dissolved in the lifeworld, art, at best, becomes activism (caring for how we live together); at worst, it becomes entertainment (addressing consumers rather than what Rancière would call emancipated spectators). The Latin root of the noun “exhibition”, exhibere, means “to hold out.” The exhibition and making perceptible of the work is crucial to its ability to create a reflexive transformation of the non-aesthetic and non-artistic spheres of the lifeworld in which it embeds itself or at which it is directed. The act of exhibition simultaneously presents and creates distance. This distance installs a difference, which makes the reflexive transformation of our shared reality possible.

________

Lucy Steeds, “Exposability: On the Taking-Place in Future of Art,” in Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions, eds. Tristan Garcia and Vincent Normand (Berlin: Sternberg, 2019), 75-84: 75 (italics in the original).

See Kim West, “Concepts for the Critical Study of Art Exhibitions as Media,” in Theater, Garden, Bestiary, eds. Garcia and Normand, 45-55: 48: “the complex of apparatuses in relation to which exhibitionary apparatuses today achieve their definition is the network of digital media, understood in a wide sense: as the matrix of ubiquitous, interconnected devices and platforms, which forms a global infrastructure of shared information standards and ideals, synchronised with the production models of contemporary capitalism, imposing its rhythms and demands on social, cultural, and political life.”

Steeds, “Exposability,” pp. 82-83. Steeds' points here are made with reference to Walter Benjamin's “What is Epic Theatre?” (1939).

Eyal Weizman, “Open Verification,” Becoming Digital, e-flux Architecture (June 2019), accessed January 28, 2022, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/becoming-digital/248062/open-verification/. See also Eyal Weizman (in conversation with Jacob Lund), “Inhabiting the Hyper-Aesthetic Image,” The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, nos. 61-62 (2021): 230-243, 236ff.

See for instance Oliver Marchart, “[A]rtistic practices have emerged for which it is more important to be connected to political practices than to art institutions themselves, which in turn, necessarily changes our concept of the public sphere – and of the institution as well.” Conflictual Aesthetics: Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere (Berlin: Sternberg, 2019), 144.

West, “Concepts for the Critical Study,” 45. West’s observations are based on Jean Davallon’s L’exposition à l'œuvre: Stratégies de communication et médiation symbolique (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1999), 11.

Tristan Garcia, “Neither Gesture nor Work of Art: Exhibition as Disposing for Appearance,” in Theater, Garden, Bestiary, eds. Garcia and Normand, 181-194: 183.

Jacques Rancière, “The Pensive Image,” in The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), 107-132.

See Thinking about Exhibitions, eds. Reesa Greenberg et al. (London: Routledge, 1996).

Bruce W. Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics: Material speech and utter sense,” in Thinking about Exhibitions, eds. Greenberg et al., 175-190: 176.

West, “Concepts for the Critical Study,” 45.

See George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974).

Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics,” 183-184.

See Wolfgang Iser, Die Appellstruktur der Texte. Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa (Konstanz: Verlag der Druckerei und Verlagsanstalt Konstanz Universitätsverlag, 1970).

See Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture, 14:1 (2002): 59-90.