Entertaining diversity
An odd, but defining, feature of today's large-scale, survey exhibitions of contemporary art is that they acquired the character of their antecedents, the late nineteenth-early twentieth century trade exhibitions. It is odd given that most of the early pioneers of modern art rarely gained significant solo exhibitions in their own lifetime, let alone participation in exhibitions on the scale of today's biennales, triennials or contemporary art fairs. The scale of exhibition and presentation was something only rarely, if ever, glimpsed in contemporary art of the first half of the twentieth century. But what is at issue in this essay is not simply a re-run of arguments about the institutionalization and corporatisation of the avant-garde, though these considerations are implicit and to a certain extent unavoidable. This is more about the consequences of reception and curatorial ambition in regard to such enormity of scale and the diversity of what is shown. Such scale often outruns both reception and curatorial ambition.
The survey exhibitions share one chief analogy with the trade fairs in that they seek to display a broad and diverse range of the latest wares. Such surveys are modes of transmission; a transmission of what's new or, at least otherwise, what's intriguing or compelling in contemporary art. As such, they amount to the transmission of mobile inventory and transmission as mobile, contingent inventory. Most debate about these art exhibitions still more or less pivots on a variation of the form/context dichotomy.
Does the tight thematic exhibition malign the integrity of the autonomous work? Is the context crudely deterministic? Always fair enough questions. Then again the large, open-ended survey presents another challenge. The most broad and disparate exhibition is liable to... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline