Pierre Huyghe, Untilled (2011–12)

Pierre Huyghe, Untilled (2011–12), detail of site-specific installation at dOCUMENTA (13), commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA (13) with the support of Colección CIAC AC, Mexico, Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création, Paris, and Ishikawa Collection, Okayama, Japan. Photo: the artist, courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris, and Esther Schipper, Berlin.

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ANDY WEIR Goldsmiths College, University of London

Cosmic Alreadymades: Exhibiting Indifference at dOCUMENTA (13)

Abstract Keywords Departing from the proposal by curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev to ‘see from the Documenta point of view of the meteorite’ at dOCUMENTA (13), this article analyzes the exhi- Pierre Huyghe bition’s claim to non-anthropocentric knowledge production through the paradoxical Guillermo Faivovich staging of a form that re-prioritizes human experience. It focuses on two works: Pierre Nicolas Goldberg Huyghe’s Untilled (2012), which coalesces an affect of indifference to the central- critique of ity of human experience; and Guillermo Faivovich and Nicolas Goldberg’s El Chaco anthropocentrism (2012), which sets inexperiencable timescales under contemporary exhibition condi- temporality in tions. Both works open political questions through complicity with material processes. exhibitions At the same time, they point to potentials and limitations for the methodology of the ‘alreadymade’, understood here in terms of the staging of non-human timescales for human participants, and the making affordable of systemic threat.

1. Cosmic Alreadymade

i. to see from the point of view of the meteorite 1. The use of ‘apathic’, or without sensation or – Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (2012: 30) feeling, is a variant of ‘apathetic’. Could 860,000 visitors have been intoxicated by an apathic gaze […]? – Thierry Geoffroy (2012: 228)

The intoxicating apathic point of view of the meteorite haunted dOCU- MENTA (13).1 For their work El Chaco (2012), Guillermo Faivovich and

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Nicolas Goldberg set out to remove the largest fragment of the 4.5 billion-year-old El Chaco meteorite from its landing place in north- central Argentina and re-locate it to Kassel for the exhibition. After protests following a dispute with members of the Moqoit First Nation community, for whom El Chaco is held as a sacred link between the spiritual realm and the earth, Documenta cancelled the loan deal on the grounds of liberal openness towards and respect for the wishes of other cultures:

dOCUMENTA (13) stated that no loan of the El Chaco meteorite would be further requested without a full endorsement by the pue- blos originarios, the traditional custodians of the land of Chaco, by the local community as a whole, and in careful consideration of the beliefs and principles of those custodians today. (Documenta 2012)

Failing to achieve this fantasy of inclusive consensus on behalf of the community as a whole, the lump of rock remained in the show as a double looming emptiness, neither fully in its Argentinian resting place, where it was Photoshopped out of the exhibition catalogue, nor fully in Kassel, where it was referred to through minutes of a meeting capturing the decision of its non-arrival. Described by the curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev as an act that ‘can be interpreted within the frame and history of the conceptual readymade’ (Documenta 2012: 60), El Chaco clearly drew on the institutional framing of dOCUMENTA (13) in order to point to and nominate the meteor and its removal as art, asking what was at stake in the temporal clashes alluded to in its accompanying description:

The appearance of this cosmic ‘alreadymade’ on Friedrichsplatz constitutes a temporal paradox reminiscent of the mysterious monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Yet it is not a message from the future but a remnant from the birth of our solar system. A sheer embodiment of mass and gravity, it coexists anachronistically in our current dematerialized and digi- talized world. (Documenta 2012: 60)

Through this description of the work as a ‘cosmic alreadymade’, attention was drawn to the importance of the methodological tradition of the ‘alreadymade’ in dOCUMENTA (13) as a whole. The ‘alreadymade’ can be understood as the registration of processes, temporalities and materialities that do not necessarily prioritize the human (the point of view of the meteorite), and the staging of these processes for humans (the appearance on Friedrichsplatz). The conflict over El Chaco could be read as the incommensurability of claims staked for the non-terrestrial – a clash between contemporary art and Aboriginal cosmologies. At the same time, however, this can also be read as a pseudo-conflict: failing in the physical removal of the rock, the work succeeded in compressing a set of concerns – postcolonial struggle; cosmologies; the investment of spirit

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Guillermo Faivovich and Nicolas Goldberg, Vol. II: Chaco: First Encounter with El Chaco, June 1st, 2006 (2006), video, 12 minutes (above); Vol. II: Chaco. The Weight of Uncertainty (2012), 3,544 kg iron mass, four A4 sheets (transcriptions) (below). Photos: © Faivovich & Goldberg, courtesy of Nusser & Baumgart, Munich.

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in rock; pre-terrestrial timescales; bureacracies of transport; the suspense of delay; and so on – into its horizon, as they came to constitute the expanded materials of the work. El Chaco, through its registration of materialites anterior to terrrestrial timescales, performs Christov-Bakargiev’s claim for dOCUMENTA (13) as a kind of non-anthopocentric knowledge production:

dOCUMENTA (13) is driven by a holistic and non-logocentric vision that is shared with, and that recognizes, the knowledges of animate and inanimate makers of the world. The attempt is to not put human thought hierarchically above the ability of other species and things to think and produce knowledge […]. [This attempt] makes us more humble, able to see the partiality of human agency, encouraging a point of view that is less anthropocentric. (2012: 31)

The point of view of the meteorite, as material presence preceding human thought and experience, forces the thought of humankind’s contingency, potentially re-aligning the priority and centrality of a specifically humanist point of view. The claim for a less anthropocentric point of view, however, runs into the central paradox of then staging this as an art exhibition for humans. Christov-Bakargiev goes on to address this through a reconsid- eration of the importance of ‘art’ as a defining term:

Different forms of knowledge lie at the heart of the active exercise of reimagining the world. What these participants do and what they ‘exhibit’ in dOCUMENTA (13) may or may not be art. However, their acts, gestures, thoughts and knowledges produce and are produced by circumstances that are readable by art, aspects that art can cope with and absorb. The boundary between what is art and what is not becomes less important. (2012: 31)

What this argument does, while claiming to deprioritize ‘art’ as a category, is actually to re-prioritize the importance of ‘exhibition’ as the primary cohering production of knowledge and meaning. The exhibition, as a container for practices of both art and non-art, comes to play the role of institutional enclosure. The idea of a meta-system that can cope with, absorb and make readable any kind of art and non-art seems to suggest not a de-prioritizing of the category of art, as is claimed, but instead the re-affirmation of art, understood in its contemporary sense as a set of conditions for the experience, interpretation and understanding of any- object-whatever (Vidokle and Wood 2012). Christov-Bakargiev’s argument here maintains a power for the exhibition-form as that which registers other productions of knowledge. Her use of the non-anthropocentric in this case could be understood as merely a truth-condition for art, while ‘art’ itself is ultimately asserted and prioritized as transcendent from the potentially ungrounding force of ‘nature’ or the non-human. The concerns surrounding and constituting El Chaco, including its temporal tensions and political resonance, become ‘circumstances readable by art’ presided

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over and made readable by the benevolent and sensitive-to-difference 2. In my use of the term ‘dia-chronic’, I draw on host institution, all points of view devoured by the blank and expanding Quentin Meillassoux’s meterorite-shaped hole. After Finitude, where he uses the term to This creates a tense situation. Non-anthropocentric knowledge is refer to the statements proposed and staged through a form that re-prioritizes human experi- made by science ence. I am interested in what happens to the status of the exhibition here, about events ‘anterior or ulterior to every as well as how art generally is claimed to be redefined, and in what kinds terrestrial-relation-to- of subjectivities could be produced through its performance and paradox. the-world’ (2008: 112). While the ‘arche-fossil’ Can the exhibition form itself act as a registration of the flattening out of or ‘fossil-matter’ plays human priority, or does it merely re-prioritize human subjectivity under the role of ‘indicating the existence of existing conditions? I am particularly interested in the claims to and ancestral reality or deployments of inhuman temporalities, and in considering what kinds of event’ (2008: 10), the politics are at stake in this siting of the non-anthropocentric as knowl- dia-chronic statement includes the claims to edge for art. I will continue to address these concerns through analysis make verifiable and of another key work in dOCUMENTA (13) – Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled meaningful reference to this matter as well (2012). This work, through its staging of non-human-dependent proc- as to events ulterior to esses, produces an affect of indifference to the centrality of human expe- the extinction of the rience, which sets the work within and against a regime of participatory human species. practice. Following this, I will return to Faivovich and Goldberg’s El Chaco, 3. In my use of the term ‘affect’ here and a work which, as described, asks what happens when ‘deep’ non-human throughout the essay, I timescales are set under contemporary exhibition conditions, when dia- am following Massumi chronicity is made material.2 While Boris Groys (2009) has proposed (2002) and Shaviro (2010: 3) who made a thinking of the contemporary as a time of delay, uncertainty and indeci- distinction between sion, calling for people to become comrades, helpers and collaborators affect as asubjective and emotion as with such ‘unproductive’ time, the plays of time in these two works open affect captured by a up other temporalities, perhaps indifferent to anyone’s help. Both works, subject. Affect in this sense may constitute, I will argue, raise important questions, through complicity with material overwhelm or traverse processes, that have continued relevance to questions of curating and the subjectivities. Taking exhibition form. this approach allows for a focus on potential transformations of subjectivity under 2. Compost Model posthumanist conditions (Callus and The point of view of the meteorite can be posited as one of indifference Herbrechter 2012), rather than its rejection to the human. Its exhibition, therefore, coalesces its strange affect as a or avoidance. two-step experience of indifference to the audience’s experience.3 This specific affective play is intensified in Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled, which took place in the composting area at the back of the Karlsaue Park exhibition space. The area looked overgrown and makeshift, with piles of gravel and algae-covered puddles. It consisted of various elements: a wandering skinny white Podenco Ibencico dog with a painted pink leg; a concrete statue of a reclining female nude with its head immersed and covered in a beehive; a dead and uprooted oak, recalling Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks work at Documenta 7 in 1982; peyote and afghan poppies; toxic foxglove and jimson weed; a scrawled diagram and a text by Huyghe in the exhibition catalogue and a video interview with him on the website. Relations were suggested, through their gathering, between bees and plants, art histories and the earth, interventions and contingent processes. It is clear, first of all, that composting is taken not just as a figurative but as a literal model for the work. The decomposition and recycling of organic

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Pierre Huyghe, Untilled (2011–12), detail from site-specific installation at dOCUMENTA (13), commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA (13) with the support of Colección CIAC AC, Mexico, Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création, Paris, and Ishikawa Collection, Okayama, Japan. Photo: the artist, courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris, and Esther Schipper, Berlin.

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matter, at varying speeds, provides a formal compositional structure for the piece. Experiencing the work, I am implicated in this, minimally through the rearranging of mud beneath my feet, and also distanced from it, as I watch processes take place that I have no direct control over and which have no interest in me as a macro-organism. Composting becomes a model for the de-stratification of categorizing processes and their replacement with a different kind of organization – one that draws nourishment from organic matter, indifferent to the histories and significations of its participating objects or experience of its viewing subjects, and indifferent to their difference. The area, as Huyghe has described it, is ‘a place where things are dropped, things which are dead or considered useless. The compost becomes a place where things are left without culture, where they become indifferent to us, metabolizing, allowing the emergence of new forms’ (quoted in Goodden 2012). By staging this indifference through its framing as artwork, my participation in and response to the work plugs into the compost model alongside catabolic fodder for mulch.

3. Non-participation In her recent study of installation and participatory art practice, Claire Bishop discusses Huyghe’s work as emerging from the early 1990s context of art as project, or performative exhibition, where the exhibition was redefined as a creative medium and ‘sociability’ was a central concern (2012: 207). Huyghe’s more recent work can be read as extending such concepts to include human and non-human actors, taking ecological interactions in biological systems as his materials. In The Host and the Cloud (2010), for example, the film traces relations between the metabolism of actors and various narcotic and psycho-social influences. In his work for Frieze Projects (2011), aquarium-hosted improvisations, including a hermit crab living in a re-creation of Brancusi’s 1910 Sleeping Muse, run parallel to and occupy the surrounding ecology of the art fair. In its staging as a set to be experienced, Untilled catalyzes other connections while suggesting a return to the kind of ‘participatory’ practices that Bishop is interested in, and at the same time (like the use of the empty museum in The Host and the Cloud and the aquarium/art fair at Frieze) continuing to reference the margins of its institutional exhibition landscape as limiting frame, emphasizing its ‘alreadymade’ strategy. In this case, the work encourages participation only to express indifference to it, situating itself in a negative relation to what can be understood as the participatory regime of contemporary art. This can be defined according to three theses extracted from Bishop’s work, used to define the turn to social, relational or participatory practices since the 1990s:

To put it simply: [1] the artist is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects than as a collaborator and producer of situations; [2] the work of art as a finite, portable, commodifi- able product is reconceived as an ongoing or long-term project with an unclear beginning and end; [3] while the audience, previously conceived as a ‘viewer’ or ‘beholder’, is now repositioned as a co- producer or participant. (2012: 2)

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Pierre Huyghe, Untilled (2011–12), details of site-specific installation at dOCUMENTA (13), commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA (13) with the support of Colección CIAC AC, Mexico, Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création, Paris, and Ishikawa Collection, Okayama, Japan. Photos: the artist, courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris, and Esther Schipper, Berlin.

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It is interesting to point out here very briefly, in the context of the UK New Labour era that provides the backdrop for Bishop’s history, the parallels in this definition with shifts to more flexible labour models. This definition evokes (1) shifts of focus from manufacture to ‘post-Fordist’ forms of affective and immaterial labour, where productions of experience supplant productions of goods (Lazzarato 2006); (2) precarious conditions with no long-term security; and (3) affects of universal inclusivity and a discourse of non-hierarchical self-organization, underwritten with promises of individual freedom and autonomy. Returning to the quote, Huyghe’s Untilled correlates with the first two theses. The work, however, does not fulfil the third part of Bishop’s definition. As suggested in my analysis above, Untilled’s audience is not conceived as viewer or beholder, but neither is it repositioned as co-producer or participant. Viewers of the work have been described as ‘collaborators’ (Druchs 2012), but actually, fundamen- tally, and against the criteria of Bishop’s model, they are not. People are implicated in processes of which they are a part, but they are refused any sense of co-production through the indifference of the work’s appeal to them. While, for Bishop, people come to constitute the central artistic medium and material for participatory practice (2012: 2), in Untilled this priority is rejected both in terms of material constitution and of meaning- making through interpretation or participation. The viewer, in my analysis above, makes no difference. This creates an affect in stark contrast to the potency of individual agency promised by a repositioning as co-producer. What is at stake in such a claim becomes clearer when one examines how Bishop’s argument develops into a political dimension. As her book’s subtitle suggests, she develops a critical reflection on art as the site for a ‘politics of spectatorship’ (2012). Subjectivity is fundamental to this, ‘it is possible to say that all art presumes a subject – insofar as it is made by a subject (the artist) and is received by a subject (the viewer)’ (2012: 10). Here she is critical of the ways in which this exchange can lead to claims for consensus that mask actual social divisions, a model of subjectivity premised upon ‘togetherness […] feel-good positions […] the fictitious whole subject of harmonious community’ (2004: 79), that she read in Nicolas Bourriaud’s (2000) definitions of ‘relational aesthetics’, if not in all the associated practices of that time. Such consensus was replaced in her argument with the demand for a ‘relational antagonism’, premised on ‘a divided subject of partial identifications open to constant flux’ (2004: 79). It is this modality of subjectivity that she pursued in her study of installation art, where art plays the role of simultaneously, on one hand, activating and, on the other hand, decentring or dispersing subjectivity. The work she valorizes here ‘insists on our presence to subject us to experience of decentring’ (Bishop 2005: 130), its very force coming from the way this experience is not only articulated but performed by the work in correlation with a paradoxically activated/decentred participating subject. This experience is political because, through its negativity and continual unrecon- ciled tension, it draws attention to that which otherwise remains occluded by the feeling of harmony in relational aesthetics, and by extension, to affective underpinnings of liberal democratic communities, supporting instead transformation and change. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s argu- ments that consensus supresses difference so instead ‘radical democracy’

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should make visible and re-negotiate oppressive power relations (2005: 146), Bishop’s argument configures this through claiming the affective experience of the artwork as a kind of disruptive tension, conducted through the participating subject in flux.

4. Ecologically Extended Antagonism While such debates around ‘relational’ practices have become familiar since 2005, I propose that it is valuable to return to Bishop’s argument, with a different emphasis, in the wake of more recent artistic and curatorial practices that express greater hostility towards the prioritizing of subjective experience, or even to clear subject/object divisions at all. dOCUMENTA (13) was particularly interesting in highlighting such practices, including, for example, as well as the works discussed here, a staging of Anton Zeilinger’s (2012) experiments in quantum physics, or Toril Johannessen’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions (2011) with its deployment of energy cycle temporalities performing a material temporality irreducible to human experience. As well as economic and ecological narratives highlighted in the curatorial framing of the exhibition, such practices can be read in parallel with theoretical developments such as, for example, Ray Brassier’s (2007) evocation of ‘the truth of extinction’ as knowledge of the fact of extinction that forces a non-anthropocentric awareness of the death of thought, and the various positions proposed in the so-called ‘speculative turn’ in philosophy and cultural theory (Bryant et al. 2011). A common feature of these wide-ranging and disparate factors is a ques- tioning of the centrality and priority of the human, and of subjective access to and domination over the world. Art as exhibition, as highlighted by dOCUMENTA (13), runs into the further problem of what it means to stage such debates, re-addressed to spectators in some way, without therefore re-affirming existing subjective priority. Bishop’s model remains useful in thinking of re-negotiations of object relations but remains tied to a residual anthropocentrism within its broadly anti-humanist emphasis on the de-centred subject. The fact of living in a situation where the decentring and flux-inducing practices she describes have (economically, affectively, conceptually) become part of the repertoire of neoliberal capitalism they are claimed to disrupt, actually offers a way to hypothesize the turn to irreversible times of ‘nature’ within art practice as radically inhuman disruptions, unrecuperable and irreducible to capitalist circulations of desire. The return to the alreadymade, on this reading, is taken as a matter of political urgency, producing an expanded concept of antagonism that extends throughout human and non-human relations, thereby suggesting topological experimentation through practice-based deployments of art as a traumatic occupation of its circumstances. Terminologies of antagonism return in the surrounding material for Untilled where it is posited that ‘there are antagonisms […] with no encounters’ (Huyghe 2012). The term is expanded here, however, alluding not solely to human power relations but to a broader ecology consisting of human participation alongside non-human dependent processes. Stripping the focus away from a subjective encounter with

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the work shifts attention to forms of antagonism not dependent on their exhibition. Departing from Bishop’s analysis, one may experience a feeling of decentring, but this is not the focus of the work, which continues its complicity with material processes. As Huyghe notes (2012), it is the ants and other creatures that perform the essential duties: ‘The colony pollinates aphrodisiac and psychotropic plants. […] Myrmecochory occurs’. While experience is folded into the work as part of its materials, it is not prioritized and the work is not conditioned by it. Events take place, in other words, which I am inevitably implicated in ecologically, while the work is not reduced to a stage for my experience, activation or tension. The antagonisms disavowed in relational aesthetics and valorized in Bishop’s critique re-appear on an extended ecological plane, without, however, addressing a subject to feel, resolve, interpret or be disrupted by. This non-encountered non-participation takes place not through refusal or escape, but simply through an indifference of address. Two questions then arise: why does the work need to be exhibited as art, and to what end? One possible response is to read it as a kind of performatively experienced crtique of participation itself. Bishop has argued, while pointing to the UK context of New Labour’s embrace of social art practice as a form of soft social engineering, that oppositional practices become entwined in the limits of the discourse they oppose:

Even though participatory artists invariably stand against neoliberal capitalism, the values they impute to their work are understood formally (in terms of opposing individualism and the commodity object), without recognizing that so many other aspects of this art practice dovetail even more perfectly with neoliberalism’s recent forms (networks, mobility, project work, affective labour). (2012: 281)

These ‘other aspects’ can also be broadened, however, to include the labour, subjectification and conditions of participation itself. As Maurizio Lazzarato has argued of the immaterial labour crucial to neoliberal econo- mies, ‘the new slogan of Western societies is that we should all “become subjects”. Participative management is a technology of power, a technology for creating and controlling the subjective processes’ (2006: 134). It can be argued that offering new participatory choices or communities does not unproblematically challenge these technologies of power, because inherent to the very notion of participatory practice is already a valorization and prioritization of a subject concomitant with current neoliberalism. Art under this regime, in other words, addresses an individual subject (or a group of individual subjects) to feel like a free autono- mous co-producer(s) of the meaning of the work, precisely through their affective and interpretative stakeholding participation, the openness of constant flux part of the ‘liberatory repertoire’ of critique turned neoliberal managerialism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007: 97). Tension, negativity and disruption are framed through this insistently central presence, the conditions of which remain unchallenged, offering, it can be argued, no real freedom. The enclosure of Untilled can be understood not only as the

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demarcation of an exhibiting stage but also a closing off as refusal and negation of such openness.

5. dOCUMENTA (13) and the Expanded Alreadymade Understood as variations on an ‘alreadymade’ methodology, El Chaco and Untilled draw on a tradition of contemporary art that looks to temporalities outside of itself, bringing the non-contemporary into its frame. Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963–65), for example, takes the form of a 76cm square Plexiglas container filled with around 1cm of water that, due to the difference in humidity between the inside of the box and its gallery environment, reaches dew-point and turns to condensation, the transparent box becoming a stage for this material process. As Benjamin Buchloh has argued, this creates a state of relative independence for viewers:

[T]he viewer of Condensation Cube is no longer exclusively, or even primarily linked to the work through perceptual interaction, but rather observes the traces and texture of physiological and physical processes generated within the work, which operates in relative independence from the viewing subject. (1995: 48)

The event of condensation is independent from a viewer as it would take place, indifferently, whether perceived or not. The work achieves only a ‘relative independence’, however, as it remains dependent on the institutional viewing conditions of the gallery, mirrored in its containment in the Plexiglas cube. Similarly to the works in question here, Haacke’s work functions to put non-human-dependent materialities under contemporary art conditions, drawing attention to temporalities that do not necessarily organize around a viewing human subject (cycles of condensation), and presenting them to a viewing human subject. In parallel with the Duchampian readymade, the alreadymade prioritizes both the institutional conditions of viewing and the nominating power of an authored individual circulated as a name on the art market. Following John Roberts’s argument for the ‘deflationary logic’ of the readymade, it can be argued that such work expands art to include ‘alien […] non-artistic things […] made with very little labour’, so binding the artist to ‘the intellectual demands of re-contextualizing extant objects in order to change their sign-value’ with the consequence that ‘art can be made quite literally from anything’ (2010: 82–83). This leads to a situation where not only artistic re-contextualization but also the freedom and openness of interpretive pluralism are prioritized – ‘quite literally anything’ is open to a multiplicity of viewpoints, all permissible within its own institutional boundaries. Rather than drawing attention to shifts in artistic labour and skill, however, the alreadymade’s focus on non-human crafted extant objects expands this ‘anything’ and definitions of the ‘object’ to include inhuman materials and processes, asking what happens when these ‘alien things’ are put under the conditions of contemporary art.

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Guillermo Faivovich and Nicolas Goldberg, Vol. II: Chaco: ‘El Chaco en Kassel’ (2013), mixed media: wallpaper, C-prints, cabinets. Photo: © Faivovich & Goldberg, courtesy of Nusser & Baumgart, Munich.

If the ‘anything can be art’ permissibility instituted by the readymade prioritizes the institutionally regulated interpretive freedoms of the viewing subject, then the ‘relative independence’ of alreadymade materials introduces a further tension. Rather than the negativity of non-art being recuperated under the dynamic dialectical synthesis in Roberts’s argument where ‘skill, deskilling and re-skilling become the very means whereby this dynamic expresses itself’ (2010: 94–95), ensuring the devel- opment of art’s critical relationship to tradition, the alreadymade stages a threat to art’s tradition by alluding to the presentation of materiality that its conditions of representation cannot account for conceptually or affectively. In the case of Condensation Cube, through both alien- ating its viewers (through presenting a process indifferent to them) and addressing them (through its transparent staging), attention is drawn to the tensions in its own conditions of human-centred viewing. At the same time, however, the threat of radically inhuman nature is dispersed under the sign of critique. Haacke’s work functions to draw attention to its gallery environment not as a value-neutral space of transparency but, through its constantly monitored humidity regulation, as an active agent in the systematic production of meaning of the work, employing the thermohygrometric humidification system as a form of self-aware institutional critique, revealing the implication of the museum in broader

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ecologies, and vice versa. Its status as alreadymade both allows for and limits the work within this critical frame.

6. Cosmic Timegrab: The Alreadymade as Affordable Exorbitance Taking dOCUMENTA (13) as a guide, it can be argued that the use of the alreadymade as an artistic methodology has recently intensified and accel- erated, informed by developments in technological, scientific, ecological and philosophical contexts. The affect of Untilled involved not so much a de-prioritizing, but, paradoxically, an abject indifference to the centrality of experience. El Chaco set up a similar paradox: it evoked and acted as a document to the meteor storm prior to terrestrial timescales, and thus was inexperiencable; while at the same time it was brought into the realm of experience through its exhibition (or non-exhibition in this case). This created a tension between, on the one hand, the experiential time of the organism and, on the other, the pre-organic or non-organic ‘deep’ temporality of the meteorite. This production of tension conjured up not only Christov-Bakargiev’s claims for anachronistic embodiment, and the activated dispersal of subjecthood in Bishop’s argument, but also philosopher Reza Negarestani’s topological discussion of the exogenic and endogenic tensions and syntheses of trauma, which draws on and departs from Freud’s energetic model in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Indeed, this suggests an approach – through an expanded concept of trauma – for rethinking the alreadymade at the exhibition’s human/non-human interface. In Negarestani’s argument, the emergence of the organic from the inorganic constitutes a traumatic scission, temporarily establishing a regional horizon of interiority before returning to the inorganic (universal continuum). This produces a tension where the organic is pulled back to the inorganic (Freud’s death drive) creating a temporally figured incommensurability:

This tension is produced between the reality of the inorganic that cannot be experienced (because it is diachronic to the organic subject) and the interiorized horizon of the subject of experience. In short, this tension is the expression of the incommensurability of the diachronic contingent reality of the inorganic that is now – thanks to the topological militancy of trauma – dynamically posited inside and outside the interiorized horizon. (2011: 27)

In my introduction, El Chaco was described in terms of its stereo- scopic spectrality, both appearing (as a lumpy material presence on the Friedrichsplatz) and not appearing (erased from its catalogue representation) at dOCUMENTA (13). Following Christov-Bakargiev’s definition of the exhibition as ‘that which makes circumstances readable’, El Chaco can be understood as a strange topology, both occupying these conditions of readability and not occupying them, or occupying them as non-occupying. The contingent ‘real‘ of the time of the El Chaco meteorite remains both inside art’s limits (as presented) and exterior to them (as unrepresent- able), a kind of intrusion of insider-exteriority.

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The alreadymade can be understood as a model of exteriority coded under the system of art. In Haacke’s Condensation Cube, for example, the ‘outside’ is coded as an externality affordable by the organism of contemporary art, which absorbs its self-critique, without shifting its conditions. In Negarestani’s terms this is a kind of ‘economical’ binding of exteriority, which he locates within capitalism as a strategic mode of thought, ‘the ultimate counter-revolutionary tool’ (2003, 2011: 28). It can also, however, in this context, be read as crucial to contemporary art’s strategic negotiation with the real. The time of the meteorite is acknowledged and desired but proves difficult as a ‘circumstance readable by art’ because of its excess energetic unreadability (or inexperiencability), its difficulty highlighted by the Moqoit request, which reveals contemporary art’s claim to a universal inclusivity of interpretation as actually contingent, because other conflicting ‘readings’ are at stake. This disruption to the claims of universality is made affordable through the liberal openness of the loan cancellation, which ‘celebrate[s] the material and spiritual heritage of the world and all its peoples’ (Documenta 2012: 31). This simultaneously rejects the alternative cosmological investment of the Moqoit, while, at the same time, affording it through reducing it to its horizon, expanding the bounded limits of contemporary art through an economical and strategic engagement with its outside. The point of view of the meterorite is an incommensurable time. Returning to the initial claim for dOCUMENTA (13) as speculative non- anthropocentric knowledge production, it can be argued that this is undermined through the dominance of the alreadymade, which prioritizes art as a set of parasitical interpretive conditions for existing knowledge, safeguarded through a layer of critique. At the same time, the resurgence of the alreadymade suggests ways that artists are turning to non-human temporalities as a matter of political urgency, leading to proposals for rethinking relations of exteriority internal to a system, not limited by critique. In Groys’s proposal to consider the contemporary as ‘with-time’ (2009), he argues that there is a need for artists and curators to become comrades with time. Rethinking this comradeship instead as a strategic complicity both with and, crucially, against time forces opens the question of how art could engage with the dia-chronic differently. Untilled catalyzes its participatory conditions, subjecting them to an ongoing oper- ation of compostation. El Chaco transforms both dia-chronic temporality and political negotiation into a set of ‘readable circumstances’. These are tendencies to escape the time of the contemporary, which both stage a threat to their systemic containment, and are made affordable as readable circumstances. What they do suggest is the use of art in sketching and navigating new, sometimes paradoxical and topologically counter- intutitive relations between contingencies of dia-chronic temporality and the times of lived experience. The works discussed here draw attention to the central contradiction between exhibiting (as separating out some- thing exceptional for display) and indifference (as refusing to acknow- eldge such exceptionality), leading to a paradoxical curatorial strategy of exhibiting indifference as an interface between the terms. How this is possible without, on the one hand, re-affirming the subjective centrality of the spectator, or, on the other hand, opaquely cutting off possibilities of knowledge production, remains a key question for exhibition generally.

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While dOCUMENTA (13) pointed to the possibilities and limitations of the contemporary exhibition form to challenge the anthropocentrism of artistic and aesthetic knowledge production, this principle now needs to be developed through future exhibition- or non-exhibition-based artistic and curatorial practice.

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Massumi, Brian (2002), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Meillassoux, Quentin (2008), After Finitude, London: Continuum. Mouffe, Chantal (2005), The Return of the Political, London: Verso. Negarestani, Reza (2003), ‘Death as a Perversion: Openness and Germinal Death’, ctheory.net, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=396. Accessed 29 November 2012. Negarestani, Reza (2011), ‘Globe of Revolution: An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism’, Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, 17, pp. 25–54. Roberts, John (2010), ‘Art After Deskilling’, Historical Materialism, 18: 2, pp. 77–96. Shaviro, Steven (2010), Post-Cinematic Affect, London: Zero. Vidokle, Anton and Wood, Brian Kuan (2012), ‘Breaking the Contract’, e-flux Journal, 37, September, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/breaking- the-contract/. Accessed 14 November 2013.

Suggested Citation Weir, Andy (2014), ‘Cosmic Alreadymades: Exhibiting Indifference at dOCUMENTA (13)’, Journal of Curatorial Studies 3: 1, pp. 98–116, doi: 10.1386/jcs.3.1.98_1

Contributor Details Andy Weir is an artist based in London, UK. His research interests include deep time and the political stakes of de-prioritized subjectivity for contemporary art. Recent exhibitions include Talking to the Exterior World at Transmediale 2013, Berlin and Geologies of Value and Vestige at Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, London (2013). Recent publica- tions include ‘Thick Diachronic Crash’ in Realism Materialism Art (2013); ‘Compressed Intercessor’ in O-Zone: Journal of Object-Oriented Studies (2013); and ‘Deep Time Contagion’ in continent. (2013). He is Lecturer in Fine Art at Norwich University of the Arts and Ph.D. Researcher at Goldsmiths College, University of London. http://andyweir.info Contact: Art Research, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, SE14 6NW, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Andy Weir has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format it was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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