In Six Years, curator and critic Lucy Lippard (1973, p.viii) states that conceptual art “means works in which the idea is paramount and the material form is
secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and or
‘dematerialised’”. For Lippard, a conceptual artwork comes into existence through the way it is communicated and through the formats of representation it adopts. This suggests that its actualisation depends on the support used in producing the idea and mediating it for an audience—be it a piece of instruction sent by phone or a diagram in a catalogue. Although Lippard discusses the artwork as a dematerialised object—while this study considers it as not-discrete—the critic’s proposition of moving away from medium-specificity, in favour of a type of site-specificity for which the artwork is actualised in relation to the contexts it enters and its modes of distribution, resonates with web-based practices (see 2.3) and exhibitions that migrate (see also 3.8). The critic
proposes a shift which makes obsolete not only the idea of the object as a fixed and definable entity but also its presentation in the confined space of a gallery.
By putting forward the possibility of experiencing an artwork in relation to a site of display that is contextual and procedural, Lippard paves the way for a
discussion of the notion of the ‘distributed exhibition’ where artworks are
“re-Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Chapter 2: Contextual Review
located and dislocated” (Joselit, 2013), forerunning discourses around artistic practices engaging with web technology and its infiltration in the everyday.
The Musée d’Art Modern, Department des Aigles by Marcel Broodthaers (1968-1972) is an example of an artwork that was actualised by entering contexts and combining formats of presentation, generating different types of mediation to an audience. Also an exhibition model, the Musée began in Broodthaers’ home as a series of projections of nineteenth-century paintings on empty crates. It then went through many iterations, always ‘being held together’ by the symbolic narrative of the “eagle principle” (Krauss, 2000, p.20), until ‘landing’ at the Stadtische Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf in 1971 (where it showcased three hundred objects and images related to the eagle figure) and at Documenta V in 1972.
The latter entailed the gallery display, Section Publicité, and a full-page advertisement in the catalogue of the quinquennial exhibition, becoming an explicit example of the artist’s reflection on the mass communication of his time:
publicity. As an open critique of the advertising industry, its spread into the private and public sphere and the celebration of the symbolic object,
Broodthaers’ work pointed at the impact that the field was having on artistic and cultural production by “internalising” it (Krauss, 2000, p.11), that is, by adopting its forms of production and distribution. The Musée is significant to this study because it is an early example of understanding a site of display as procedural, incorporating a variety of modality of presentation and formats of production—a characteristic also seen in the case studies in this dissertation (see 3). The Musée, along with works by other artists of the same time (such as Dan
Graham’s works for magazine pages) and curators (such as Lucy Lippard and Seth Siegelaub), investigated artistic production as a phenomenon related to mass media—mostly print publishing— through developing new models of representation and mediation between the artwork and its audience. These models are precursor of the tendency identified by this study; they entail a migration, and most of all they see context and content creation as inseparable elements, opening the way to new metaphors of the curatorial role (see 2.3.2 and Cook and Graham, 2010).
Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Chapter 2: Contextual Review
The above-mentioned practices of Lippard and Siegelaub have been described by theorists such as Alberro (2003, p.19) as responding to
novel modes of communication and distribution of information, new types of consumption, an ever-more-rapid rhythm of fashion and style changes, and the proliferation of advertising and the media to an unprecedented degree.
This context resonates closely with the socio-cultural and economic
environment of digital culture (see 2.2.1). Siegelaub’s exhibitions originate from the desire of the curator to create new contexts for presenting and engaging with art outside the institution, the gallery and the museum—beside the fact that he has often been criticised for packaging art for commercial purposes and adopting strategies of promotion “similar to the operation of advertising”
(Alberro, 2003, p.32). The poster he created for Lawrence Weiner’s One Hole in the Ground Approximately One Foot by One Foot. One Gallon Water-Based White Paint Poured into This Hole (1969) is an example of “wanting to make the work palpable” (O’Neill, 2013, p.20) to an audience using the form of magazine advertisement, a form of exhibition as active archive that can also be found in current curatorial work online (see chapter 3). He also first adopted the
catalogue as an exhibition site, as a new mode of distributing art, in the form of the Xeroxed Book, co-organised with Jack Wendler in 1968. According to the curator, the magazines, catalogues and books function as “containers of information, as neutral sites in which to exhibit work" (Alberro, 2003, p.74) with the potential to reach a wider and diversified audience—a position which resonates with that of Manetas about websites as exhibition sites (see 2.3.2) but also with the work of some of the curators presented in this study (see 3.3 and 4.3). The Xeroxed Book is also an example of responding to the technology of the time, the photocopy machine. It is a reflection upon the democratisation of publishing that favours the distribution of the artwork and its communication over its uniqueness as an object of display. The Simon Fraser Exhibition (1969) instead exploited telephone communication to enhance the mediation of the artwork to the audience. For it, the artists Kosuth, Barry, LeWitt, Weiner, Huebler (based in New York) communicated with the audience (based in
Ottawa) via telephone, talking about the print works they produced for the show.
The notion of the gallery exhibition was surpassed to incorporate that of an
Curating Web-based Art Exhibitions: Chapter 2: Contextual Review
auditorium, the SFU Theatre, where the audience, rather than being viewers, participated to a discussion with the artists (Alberro, 2003, p.173). Similarly, Lippard with her renowned Numbers exhibition series (1969-1973) uses the catalogue as an extension of her shows to work outside the frame of the gallery, namely as an exhibition site in itself. Lippard exploits the form of communication of her time in accordance with the communicative properties inherent in
conceptual and ‘dematerialised’ art. Her unbound exhibition catalogues, made of print artworks in the form of drawings, notes, instructions, and diagrams, such as 557,087 (1969), “were related to transmitting information and data stripped from emotional reactions” and “force the reader to make up his or her own mind when confronted with such curious mass of information” (Lippard, 1973, p.6).
These earlier exhibition projects aimed at generating multifaceted structures of display and distribution for not-discrete objects whose embodiment would be shaped by the different contexts they were shown within, stressing their migration. Paraphrasing de Certeau (1984), the curatorial narratives they propose are similar to novels; they appropriate and use different genres, languages and references, they become plurilinguistic, and the outside
becomes the inside. This echoes the case studies of this dissertation, because the procedural and distributed nature of these exhibitions responds to the technological conditions of their times and the nature of the artworks they mediate to an audience.
2.4.2. Integrating Online and Offline Formats: the Distributed Exhibition