Daniela Lazo-Cedr

Professor Meleko Mokgosi

Exhibition Systems and Curating
13 March 2014

Organize the very same artworks in the very same space very differently, give the exhibition a
new title, and you can potentially elicit an entirely different experience or reading of the
contents...An exhibition isnt only the sum of its artworks, but also the relationships created
between them, the dramaturgy around them, and the discourse that frames them.
Elena Filipovic, What Is an Exhibition?

The Exhibition, Art, and Society:

The Context of Internal Space is Now the Content of External Factors
The typical modern exhibition system consists of four white walls, and nothing more.
Artworks are classically hung or placed on pedestals at regular distances from one another to
created a throne-like structure around them that can elevate the most absurd object, such as
Marcel Duchamps infamous Fountain, into a holy entity. All of this is done under the pretense
of not letting anything from the physical, outside world disrupt the experience the viewer will
exchange with these objects. Ironically enough, though the idea behind this practice is to keep
focus and reverence on the artwork, within the context of the exhibition the artwork becomes
secondary to the greater message provided by those same who wish to eliminate outside
influences. This greater message comes not from an organic development on the discourse of art,
but rather from the socio-economic, political, and administrative ties which corrupt and prevent
their sporadic development in an unbiased relation to these things. The exhibition has therefore
made context become the content of a particular message by using internal triggers to
communicate external desires.
In What Is an Exhibition? Elena Filipovic provides a reductionist answer to the
question which occupies the essays title: an organized presentation of a selection of items to a
!1

public the presentation can be physical or virtual, real or projected; the item either
spectacular or discursive, material or immaterial; and the public either known or unknown,
composed of one or many (7). But even in basic terms it would be misleading to discuss the
meaning of an exhibition without including its intrinsic proclivity. This non-neutral status is in
part closely tied to the transitory nature of the exhibition. If it were a permanent thing, the
institution would be taking a responsibility for one narrow ideology, which likely explains why
permanent collections typically follow the white cube contemporary model and allow
exhibition design to incorporate more creative freedom. An exhibition is always made (perhaps
can only be made), Filipovic says, from the vantage point of the moment in which it finds
itself (24). It follows then that the exhibition is characterized by exhibited ideologies which
come and go like philosophical ideas, never reaching a final verdict but rather presenting one
subjective viewpoint among many.
Brian ODoherty, in a series of celebrated essays originally published for Artforum in
1976 and known as Inside the White Cube, explains how the development of this framing model
which characterizes most contemporary exhibitions altered the work of art and its relationship to
the viewer during the 20th century:
gradually, the gallery was infiltrated with consciousness. Its walls became
ground, its floor a pedestal, its corners vortices, its ceilings a frozen sky. The
white cube became art-in-potency, its enclosed space an alchemical medium. Art
became what was deposited therein, removed and regularly replaced On
completed by the withdrawal of all apparent content the gallery becomes a zero
space, infinitely mutable. The gallerys implicit content can be forced to declare
itself through gestures that use it whole. That content leads in two directions. It
comments on the art within, to which it is contextual. And it comments on the
wider contextstreet, city, money, businessthat contains it To insert art into
gallery or case puts the art in quotation marks (87-90).

The result of this design for the viewer is the impression of being within a void where time and
space cease to exist. In his introduction to Inside the White Cube, Thomas McEvilley argues that
!2

Since this is a space where access to higher metaphysical realms is made to seem available, it
must be sheltered from the appearance of change and time (8). Clocks, windows, and any other
indication of external life have been removed to transport the viewer into eternity.
Connected to the heavens and the beyond, the viewer is free to practice ritual worship
towards the sacred objects within the space. McEvilley connects the characteristic ritual and
timelessness of the space as possible contributing reasons for its resultant dominance in the
discourse that surrounds ideas presented within it:
Behind [its] purposes may be glimpsed the political interests of a class or ruling
group attempting to consolidate its grip on power by seeking ratification from
eternity The construction of a supposedly unchanging space, then, ...is
sympathetic magic to promote unchangingness in the real or non-ritual world; it
is an attempt to cast an appearance of eternality over the status quo in terms of
the social values and also, in our modern instance, artistic values. The eternity
suggested in our exhibition spaces is ostensibly that of artistic posterity, of
undying beauty, of the masterpiece. But in fact it is a specific sensibility, with
specific limitations and conditionings, that is so glorified The white cube
suggests the eternal ratification of the claims of the caste or group sharing that
sensibility. As a ritual place of meeting for members of that caste or group, it
censors out the world of social variation, promoting a sense of the sole reality of
its own point of view and, consequently, its endurance or eternal rightness
The endurance of a certain power structure is the end for which the sympathetic
magic of the white cube is devised (8-9).

But are these conditions of the form which frames contemporary exhibitions accidental?
Art institutions are almost unexceptionally subject to the desires and values of the governments,
corporations, board of trustees, and donors who sponsor their work. There certainly a reason why
these wish to sponsor culture, or such seeming trivia as Haacke calls it, and it is unrelated to
benevolent reasons. They have understood, Haacke explains, that the term culture
camouflages the social and political consequences resulting from the industrial distribution of
consciousness (65). What they have understood is precisely the similarities between art and
religion. The medium of the exhibition, by its nature as a sacred space in which metaphysical

!3

experiences can be produced to transform the viewer, and in a politically neutral way sway the
viewer by replacing religion in the aftermath of the separation of church and state. For as Karl
Marx said himself, religion is the opium of the masses.
Furthermore, governments and corporations have comprehended that through the
apparatus of democracy they could control the masses psychologically, all the while making
them believe that they are free. If this is true, then this is certainly connected to the history and
development of peoples and their respective countries. In the United States, for example, it
would coincide with the transformation of consumer culture in the 20th century almost singlehandedly by Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freuds American nephew. Bernays understood well that
the product could be used to satisfy and fill human desires. Bernays worked directly with
companies who wanted to learn how fetishize their products in an ever-privatizing age.
The opposite model, in countries where the vast majority of cultural institutions are
public (and thus funded by the government), such as France, the use of governmental power in
the consciousness industry to control the masses echoes Baron Hausmanns real reasons for
razing the small streets of Paris to make way for les grands boulevards: to prevent barricading
and thus public revolt unrest after the French Revolution. With tools to manipulate the
unconscious mind of the individual, governments can keep the public docile, form the accepted
opinions.
The exhibition herein is one of the tools which governments and corporations transfer
their ideologies to the public, for museums are regarded first and foremost as educational
institutions, and most visitors inherently understand their mission to be centered around the
pursuit of knowledge and education. This is clearly problematic because

!4

the appearance of a zero degree of the exhibition and the pretense that the
artwork selection, organization, dramaturgy, and discursive framework could not
have been otherwise [leads the viewer to believe that] their choices represent the
unflappable truth of History, instead of one possible reading among many It
cannot attempt to educate and prove the answer, but might instead encourage
unconventional ways of looking at and reading the artwork (and then the world)
(16, 20).

How exhibitions function and matter, therefore, [is] how they participate in the construction and
administration of the experience of the items they present (Filipovic 9).
It is impossible to tell what art and exhibitions would be like if the socio-political ties
caused by economic strains were never an issue that art institutions have had to grapple with for
decades. As the model works right now, institutions through their exhibitions present the values
that the business, governmental, socio-economic, political, and administrative want individuals
to understand, believe, and recycle into the greater society.
Is it necessarily always a bad thing, however, that exhibitions intend to educate the public
by offering one interpretation of a movement, artist, tendency, pattern, idea, conflict, (etc.) the
way an article, opinion piece, critique, argument, or text does? Wouldnt being exposed to a
variety of exhibitions the way we may be exposed to a variety of dissertations be a challenging
activity for the mind as it is limited by a closed environment? Is it not an opportunity to hear the
viewpoints of others from diverse backgrounds?
Of course, but one problem with this is that the majority of viewers who go to see an
exposition are not aware that they should think critically and analytically about the presentation
of exhibition spaces, despite the fact that a majority of people who view exhibitions frequently
come from a particularly high education background and economic background. For even in
donation based and publicly-subsidized museums, where the admissions fee may be very low or
even free for some or all sectors of the population (students, seniors, etc.), there are often fees for
!5

special exhibitions. Nonetheless, regardless of these factors most viewers dont treat
exhibitions as subjective, critical texts to be taken with a grain of salt. According to James
Elkins, an art critic and historian at the Art Institute of Chicago,
There have been a number of surveys of how visitors interact with paintings in
museums. One found that an average viewer goes up to a painting, looks at it for
less than two seconds, reads the wall text for another 10 seconds, glances at the
painting to verify something in the text, and moves one. Another survey
concluded people looked for a median time of 17 seconds. The Louvre found that
people looked at the Mona Lisa an average of 15 seconds, which makes you
wonder how long they spend on the other 35,000 works in the collection. A
survey at the Metropolitan Museum of Art supposedly found that people look at
artworks for an average of 32.5 seconds each, but they must not have counted the
ones people glance at.

Although this represents several studies with several different results and variables, in all cases
the average viewer spends less than a minute looking at a single artwork, relying on the wall
label to tell her or him the significance of what she or he is looking at and the and the contextual
information walls to teach them the essence of an individual artists/group of artists interests and
intended messages.
It is the intention of those in power and who influence these institutions, of course, that
the public not be educated on the factors to consider when looking at an exhibition, for this
would limit the unconscious absorption of the ideas being communicated. It is a system difficult
to sidestep, and which can only be done by cultural discourse, whether written or visual, which
discusses and criticizes these practices.

!
!
!
!
!6

Works Cited
Elkins, James. "James Elkins: How Long Does It Take To Look at a Painting?" Editorial.
HuffPost Arts & Leisure. The Huffington Post, 6 Nov. 2010. Web. <http://
www.huffingtonpost.com/james-elkins/how-long-does-it-take-to-_b_779946.html>.
Filipovic, Elena. "What Is an Exhibition?" Designed by Nairy Baghramian. Ten Fundamental
Questions of Curating. Ed. Jens Hoffmann. Milan, Italy: Mousse, 2013. 3-29. Print.
Haacke, Hans, Rosalyn Deutsche, and Brian Wallis. Hans Haacke, Unfinished Business. New
York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986. Print. 60-73. Print.
O'Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Intro. by
McEvilley, Thomas. Berkeley: University of California, 1999. Print.

!7