Roger White O n the Aesthetic E dutainment o f M an

1. Totally Installation Gregor Schneider built a slightly smaller replica of his childhood home within the walls of the original, in Rheydt, Germany, then he excised the rooms and reinstalled them in various museums; Iris Häussler rented a house in Toronto and filled it with the simulated ephemera of a fictional, reclusive artist, then she gave tours there under the guise of an archivist of his estate; Christoph Büchel inaugurated Michele Maccarone’s Canal Street gallery by turning the disused two-story building into a dense warren of spaces representing a survivalist’s bunker, a dilapidated class­room, and other tableaux—viewers shimmied through holes in the walls to navigate the work; Robert Kusmirowski reconstructed a preindustrial fish market on the banks of a harbor for the 2008 Folkestone Triennial in Kent; for the 2002 Sydney biennial, Mike Nelson turned the former headquarters of an adventure tour company into an abandoned reptile house, complete with empty glass terrariums and an indoor pond; most recently, the collaborative team of Jonah Freeman, Justin Lowe, and Alexandre Singh have created several dense installations loosely modeled on a methamphetamine lab. The presence of so many similar examples suggests a full-fledged genre. What are its characteristics? The works apply strategies of 90s

ki installation art—like Robert Gober’s handmade simulations of common s objects, Ann Hamilton’s obsessive mise-en-scènes, and Jason Rhoades’s uzeni

Kr accumulations of consumer goods—to site-specific sculpture. They

Mike Mike ramp up the level of participation demanded of the spectator, frequently 18 Roger White 19 paper monument

involving the viewer in physical interactions with spaces that are Critics often trace the genealogy of these new works back to Ilya usually restricted in contemporary art, like climbing ladders, crawling Kabakov’s idea of the “total installation.” This form (an immersive through tunnels, and opening and closing doors. (These interactions environment simulating a quotidian space, in which the viewer encounters often necessitate another: the signing of a personal injury waiver before and interprets traces of absent, hypothetical inhabitants), elaborated entering the artwork.) In addition to physically negotiating the works, by the Russian artist in the mid-80s, allowed him to combine two main visitors are also asked to traverse them conceptually: reconstructing concerns—the representation of the everyday, and the role of fiction narratives, analyzing iconographic clues, and puzzling through their in art—in an efficient and novel way. This emphasis on the domestic strange distribution of the real and the artificial. The works are at once and the narrative also reiterated the importance of both in the evolution scrupulously non-illusionistic (composed, with few exceptions, of of his generation’s methods: for nonconformist Soviet artists in the real spaces and found objects) and extravagantly theatrical (creating 60s, exhibition, of necessity, took the form of private presentations and complex fictions of time and place). They’re like readymades run amok, discussions among members of unofficial artistic groups, frequently or hyperrealist paintings extended into space. The primary reactions in studios or apartments rather than galleries and museums. Kabakov they elicit are physical dread, ontological vertigo, and old-fashioned began piecing together separate strands of this kind of storytelling into aesthetic admiration. Thus when the works are praised, critics use large-scale installations in the mid-80s, when it became easier to exhibit accolades like “spectacular,” “obsessively detailed,” and “completely work outside the ussr. It became his primary medium around the time believable,” but also “unnerving,” “claustrophobic,” and “spatially of his emigration to the West, and was given its theoretical exposition1 and emotionally disorienting.” According to their peculiar logic, which in 1992, a year after the Soviet Union’s collapse. In fact, Svetlana Boym2 combines material literalism and an interactive idea of storytelling, has characterized one function of the total installation as reconstructive: the most effective way to represent, for example, the trauma of through the form, Kabakov was able to export, embedded in the artwork, the September 11 World Trade Center attacks would be to confront elements from its original social and cultural sphere—to such an the viewer with an actual, wrecked skyscraper. extent that this context became the work itself. The total installation I find these works terrifying; oftentimes, I’m hesitant to cross was, in effect, a portable, ersatz milieu. their thresholds, descend their stairs, climb through their broken But recent examples of the genre, produced under very different refrigerators. A day in New York involves enough encounters with claus­ political, social, and material conditions, have markedly different affects trophobic spaces and artificial reality effects that the presence of these and emphases. If Kabakov’s total installations were provisional, evoking things in art is redundant at best. Plus, the thought of encountering a walk-in diorama or a stage set, the new entries in the genre are seductively an art world acquaintance (difficult enough in the spacious white cubes illusionistic—more Hollywood than off-Broadway. Rather than politely of Chelsea) and having to make small talk while crouching in a tiny rubbish- begging a suspension of disbelief, they aim at undermining the viewer’s filled chamber that looks like an abandoned bomb shelter is beyond sense of reality. (Works are frequently presented without signage what I’m usually willing to endure for culture. Nevertheless, the genre’s or documentation, as in Nelson’s contribution to the Sydney biennial, emergence is fascinating: Why all the haunted houses? Why now? which was indicated on a map of the exhibition’s auxiliary artworks but bore no on-site designation of its status as an artwork.) If, for Kabakov, a fictional world preserved a context of lived meaning under conditions of exile, his apparent heirs use fiction to solve a tactical problem: how to salvage a representational content for art while simultaneously performing a critique of representation. Where Kabakov’s installations involved fictional protagonists (“The Man Who Flew into Space,” “The Garbage Man”) who often derived from his own biography (“The Person Who Describes His Life through Characters”), the contemporary versions employ depersonalized narratives, marked by ambiguity, irony, and the self-reflexive structures of postmodern fiction and film. They function bee as spatial pastiche: installations evoke generic spaces recognizable from previous representation in the popular media (a meth lab, a reptile r Weathe a s

Li enclosure, a survivalist’s bunker), and often create an effect of layered 20 Roger White 21 paper monument

anachronism: Robert Kusmirowski’s DATAmatic 880 (2007) resembled a framed photograph of John and Jackie Kennedy, a prayer rug, various an outdated computer lab while recalling a 60s version of the near future. artifacts from tattoo parlors, fortune tellers’ shops, a dilapidated bar, and These and other distancing effects, such as a tendency to fuse features a large chamber filled with sand. Freeman, Lowe, and Singh took an even of multiple, disjunctive locations and times into one theatrical tableau, more maximal approach, painstakingly collecting and assembling the suggest that while the viewer is being seduced by the work’s powerful reality accoutrements of the eponymous home drug factory, as well as a pantry- effect, she is also offered, as a disclaimer, ample evidence of its artificiality. cum-taxidermist’s studio and an antiquated art gallery, complete with The works’ self-conscious use of the real and the mediated an exhibition-within-an-exhibition of simulated found photographs. hearkens back to a thematics of representation familiar to readers of If the experience of Vacuum was of ominous emptiness—scattered traces Jean Baudrillard (whose notion of “the simulacrum” held sway in art of long-gone inhabitants—then Meth Lab presented viewers with a vision criticism during the period when many of the genre’s practitioners were of superabundance: the ornate mechanisms of a living counterculture, forming their creative methodologies). But the logic governing these whose participants seemed to have stepped momentarily outdoors, with artworks can also be found in other, non-art modes with much less critical no interruption of their productive activities. relationships to simulation and spectacle. The emergence of an ambitious culture of computer games, which combine immersive visual environ­ ments with non-linear storytelling modes, suggests one parallel. A subset of reality television, where participants engage physically with a constructed environment in a series of competitions, offers another. So it’s possible to look at the genre as simply a fusion of these strategies— creating a convincing mimetic environment in which the viewer becomes the protagonist of an interactive, narrative game—applied to what has become the specialized domain of contemporary art: public, cultural entertainment. This program requires space, money, and people, so it really took off during the most recent art boom, when there was an abundance of all three. Compared to earthworks, which deal with the first two but often exist in Olympian disregard of the third, these installations are an urban, crowd-based phenomenon: it wouldn’t make any practical sense to build a large-scale, basically unsellable artwork of this kind unless you had a place to put it, a person or group to subsidize the production costs, These artworks function best in a specific confluence of art and and lots of people to come and see it. These conditions obtained in real estate, and illustrate the symbiosis between the two markets the case of Mike Nelson’s A Psychic Vacuum (2007), presented by the public we’ve seen in the past decade. The works are unsurpassable as models art production group Creative Time in a vacant section of a Lower East of what art does to space. Their emphasis on first-hand experience (they Side market in New York; and also for Jonah Freeman, Justin Lowe, and don’t lend themselves to reproduction) meant that a viewer really had Alexandre Singh’s Hello Meth Lab in the Sun (2008), which was built at to be there to get their full effects, traversing not only the installations but the non-profit arts venue Ballroom Marfa in Marfa, Texas, in the spring, their environs—in the case of Vacuum, New York’s burgeoning Lower East and later reinstalled at “The Station,” an exhibition running concurrently Side, and in Meth Lab’s second incarnation, a half-finished commercial/ with Art Basel Miami, in the fall. A Psychic Vacuum comprised a series residential building in midtown Miami. The physical interactions these of disused rooms to which the artist made unspecified alterations, adding and other works require (the stooping and climbing, the opening and or arranging found and scavenged objects into assemblages suggesting closing of doors) made you even more aware of your physical presence and absent inhabitants and traumatic events. Winding through the work, the double role it played: merely by showing up, any spectator was helping viewers encountered the remains of an abandoned Chinese restaurant, turn incomplete or derelict spaces into culturally validated destinations. ette

a Santería-like shrine with candles, corn, and a taxidermied crocodile ll In fact, just navigating the installations (which always incorporate features ue head, what looked like the former office of a night watchman, a brick-walled O of the raw space into the artists’ hyperreal interventions) felt like a tin tin s

chamber with baseball bats hanging from a rack, a soiled American flag, Ju detourned art equivalent of that real estate ritual, the walk-through tour. 22 Roger White 23 paper monument

Art and its support structures are also ambivalently fused in the 2. Deinstallation subject matter. Nelson’s installation took place amid a broad program If this new genre depends on the momentum of an art–real estate synergy, of “cultural revitalization” of the Lower East Side, which boosted contem­ then it might already belong to the ages—at least in New York. Then again, porary arts patronage and tourism while displacing large swaths of the the downturn may provide the time and space, if not the money, for a neighborhood’s historically working-class population. The particular area true total installation renaissance. There are a lot of half-built condos out of the Essex Street Market that housed Vacuum has since been reopened there to haunt. to house a selection of upscale food shops. With this in mind, Nelson’s Christoph Büchel’s Training Ground for Democracy would have evocation of a mysterious, vanished world of the dispossessed and fit squarely in the genre, had the piece ever existed. The Swiss artist’s culturally other—its Santería-like shrines, squatters’ rooms, tattooists’ project for Mass MoCA, scheduled to open in December 2006, was tools, and grimy remnants of a downscale Chinese restaurant—meshed abandoned following a protracted battle between the museum and the uneasily with the knowledge that these and other milieus were, at the artist that began with disputes over budgetary issues and ended in same moment, being effaced from the Lower East Side. The show revealed a series of lawsuits. But if the genre of the contemporary total installation dismaying sets of alternatives: the neighborhood’s historical and actual is typified by friction between the aims of the artworks and the practical dereliction versus the “fictionally derelict” space ofVacuum , and the agendas of the institutions that facilitate it, then Büchel’s non-work granularity of lived history versus the smoothness of the impending may in fact represent the ideal outcome of this conflict. condominiums. Similar ambiguities confronted visitors to the Meth Lab, To recap the project’s contentious history:3 Buchel, known for which represented a transgressive economy to participants in an art his ambitious and politically charged installations (a piece in world increasingly characterized by corporate underwriting and a involved stowing disarmed missiles in a labyrinth of fabricated office professionalized code of behavior. Both pieces recalled Gregor Schneider’s rooms) was commissioned to build a work for Mass MoCA’s “Building 2003 exhibition at Gladstone Gallery in New York (in many ways the 5,” the largest of the exhibition spaces in the museum’s converted inauguration of this genre in the us) which time-warped a section mill complex. The concept of the work was described as intending to of the pristine 24th Street space back into an ominously empty concrete “evoke both a ghost town and a wartime village”4 and as a “nightmarish loading dock, while, on blocks north and south of the gallery, workmen sociopolitical maze about American culture.”5 It was to be composed were busy converting similar spaces in preparation for galleries and of symbolically charged found objects meticulously arranged, including installations to come. a mobile home, a reconstructed movie theater, a Cape Cod house, As you tour these works, you almost invariably find the represen­ a police car, oil tanker, shipping containers, cinder blocks, disarmed tation of marginality (terrorist cells’ headquarters, biker gangs’ hideouts, bombs, buses, a replica of Saddam Hussein’s “spider hole,” and most agoraphobes’ retreats) paired with the inauguration of disused spaces impressively, the fuselage of a wrecked 737. In addition to dictating (defunct factories, shuttered storefronts, dilapidated industrial centers) a list of specific items to be purchased for the show, Büchel also as cultural institutions. So while the represented content of the work has, encouraged local residents to contribute household goods and junk, on the one hand, an overtly ironic or critical relationship to its own worldly as if to determine how much matter a museum could hold before it conditions of existence, it can also be said to function in the manner would finally burst. of wish fulfillment, providing a fictive but experientiallyconvincing In December 2006, the museum balked not at the inventory itself resolution to a real problem: the preservation of cultural difference within but rather at the mounting cost of the exhibition, forcing Büchel to halt the homogenizing process of gentrification, or the maintenance of art’s production until he was assured sufficient funds were forthcoming. radicalism during its professionalization and cultural mainstreaming. In the interim, the museum continued construction and revealed sections If these works enact the transitional role of art vis-à-vis development— of the unfinished work to the public (against the artist’s wishes) as part installation as the intermediary stage between abandonment and of an exhibition—“Made at Mass MoCA”—based (ironically) on the theme gen­­trification—then it’s crucial to their function that they depict a of collaboration between artists and institutions. When Büchel declared mythologized past rather than a speculative future. You couldn’t make, that he wouldn’t proceed unless the museum met a list of conditions for example, a total installation in an empty warehouse that simulated (including a guarantee of production costs and total control over the final a residential-commercial complex with luxury condo units, a gym, form of the installation), the museum sued the artist in federal court and an organic grocery store on the ground floor; this would undermine and won the right to exhibit the unfinished work. (Büchel later appealed the conceptual foundation upon which the system currently stands. the ruling, citing the damage done to his reputation by the display of the 24 Roger White 25 paper monument

unfinished work, and arguing that the museum had violated protections accorded him under the Visual Artists Rights Act.) Within days of their legal victory, after vociferous protest on Büchel’s behalf by a multitude of critics and artists, the museum decided to dismantle the show. Though Training Ground has long since dematerialized, the case, ongoing in the US Court of Appeals, has now reached a level of density and uncertainty rivaling that of Büchel’s art. It also has a simple, uncontroversial lesson, obvious in hindsight: the scale, cost, and complexity of contemporary art at the institutional level now requires something more concrete than a handshake deal. But as with other appearances of sculpture in the legal realm, the story of Mass MoCA v. Büchel also stirred up an almost ontological debate about the novel form of Büchel’s art.6 Could an artist claim complete control over a work of such necessarily indefinite material realization? Was each individual cinderblock, shipping container, and theater seat in the installation 3. The Guggenheim Spiral its own work of art, subject to copyright protection? If the primary “Theanyspacewhatever,” which opened at the Guggenheim in the fall artistic procedure involved in constructing the work was in fact that of 2008, reconvened a group of artists (, , of acquiring materials, should the institution be considered in any way, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, , , as it initially claimed, a creative collaborator? Answers will fill legal and others) who began showing their works in the 90s, often worked journals and art history dissertations of the future. together in shifting, project-based collaborations, and more or less closely The most interesting aspect of the situation came to light as Training or happily associated with ’s critical rubric, relational Ground went from being a sculpture about a fiction to being a fictional aesthetics. The show was billed as a collaborative project itself, rather sculpture. As the work passed into pure anecdote, irrealized by the sequence than a survey of separate, (recently) historical works, that would highlight of bureaucratic and legal events that culminated in its dismantling and the common thread linking its participants: an emphasis on “experiential, landfilling, Büchel retaliated by portraying those processes of institutional situation-based work over discrete aesthetic objects.”7 The show itself, and juridical decision-making as forms of art-making—bad ones, at that. not the art, was the art: viewers seeking a more traditional arrangement He embarked on a series of “metaprojects” about the work, incorporating would be at first disappointed, but later pleasantly startled, to encounter legal documents from the case and selections from his correspondence something else. with the museum, into new installations. He filed discovery motions, then Chalk it up to the leaden pace of programming at major art signed, framed, exhibited, and sold the results. One piece, shown at the institutions, but the timing of “theanyspacewhatever” seemed just slightly 2008 Armory Fair in New York, included a stuffed Mickey Mouse doll off: neither close enough to the heyday of this ambiguously-defined rigged with a tape player that “read” excerpts from the Mass MoCA v. Büchel movement to feed off its energy, nor far enough away to allow spectators motion hearing. an objective second look. Even Nicolas Bourriaud had already moved on: Training Ground for Democracy’s failure to materialize, no doubt his new trope, the “Altermodern” would make its public debut as the title immensely painful for the artist and rightly mortifying for the museum, of the Tate Triennial in February (only a month after the Guggenheim did at least partially illuminate a way forward for the genre of the total show closed). And if it’s permissible to read simple emotions into resolutely installation. Whereas previous examples were massive and overbearing, non-expressive, neo-Conceptual works like the ones in the exhibition, requiring a huge investment of time, space, and money for questionable then the artists themselves didn’t seem happy to be doing this now, either. aesthetic or conceptual returns, Büchel’s de-installation practice ’s contribution was the easiest to interpret: he floated is compact, portable, and efficient: a slimmed-down form for the new an inflatable plastic Disney Pinocchio facedown in the pool at the base of art economy. It’s suggestive, it leaves room for imagination, and it doesn’t the Guggenheim’s famous spiral. require any heavy lifting. Plus, rather than staging a confrontation In her curatorial essay, posited—with all

in a fictionalized space, it reflects small but actual inroads into the real. Watt on requisite caveats about the limits of periodicity—a decadal narrative

Büchel has accidentally found the right way to turn a museum inside out. r Sha of art. The 80s had ended in an impasse, as artists reached the limits 26 Roger White 27 paper monument

of a self-reflexive critique of representation informed by thinkers an object, and it did create a situation, but its effect seemed too seductive like Lyotard and Foucault. Artists in the 90s would move beyond this to engender any sort of convivial, self-conscious experience of viewership. paralyzing and tedious endgame by reconfiguring the relationship It made you want to tune out and be alone. Excepting this, the works between art and the world: from representation to action. This new art in the show seemed the result of valiant but unsuccessful negotiations with would sidestep art’s probematic role in the replication of pernicious an overpowering aesthetic, conceptual, and bureaucratic context—or worse, ideologies by operating in a space of intersubjectivity: the artwork an ill-disguised fatigue with the task of subverting, resisting, or eluding it. would no longer be identical with the art object; it would be initiated Having circumvented any potential disruptions, the museum by the artist but completed by everyone, in the shared time and space proceeded to do what museums do: it arranged the works in a didactic of public exhibition. schema. In writing about the show, Spector ascribed a seemingly modest, However, unlike previous audience-oriented, art-into-life projects but in fact quite arduous, art-historical task to this group of artists: “…to (happenings, Fluxus, feminist performance art), this post-representational subtly shift the terms of artistic practice to move art beyond representation, art of engagement was less about immediate presence than strategic and to shift its reception beyond mere passivity.”9 So doing, she both echoed absence: it was, as Spector termed it, “elusive and allusive, quietly offering Bourriaud’s definition of a (“an art taking as its theoretical its own veiled commentary on how art can exist in the world today.”8 horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than Its hallmarks were indirection, ephemerality, contingency, dispersion, the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space”10) and and resistance to categorization—all qualities that would complicate the recast it as an imperative. A host of binary constructions emerged, now task of curating this survey. Avoiding the trap of reification inside a implicitly evaluated on a scale of progressivism and conservatism: sacred shrine to modern aesthetics would turn out to be very hard indeed. activation and engagement versus introspective critique, the polyphony of The attempt to construct an active space of intersubjective collaboration versus the authority of singular aesthetic visions, and (again) exchange—and not a calcified representation thereof—took two bad turns. the experiential and situational versus the discrete aesthetic object. The The first was towards the pedagogical. It’s possible that the museum last suggests a reframing of the transaction between artwork and viewer, foreclosed upon a number of more raucous experiential, situation-based wherein the former is diminished in order to emancipate the latter: in with­ proposals on the grounds of practicality, liability, and institutional mores drawing the aesthetic content from the artwork, reflecting it outwards onto (notably missing was anything as logistically or literally messy as Rirkrit the social conditions of viewing, the artist will cure the museumgoer of Tiravanija’s signature mid-90s free-Thai-food cookouts). At any rate, her desire for passivity and reconstruct her as an active subject. The viewer what the viewer did get to see was a series of fairly modest interventions will be at first disappointed, but later pleasantly startled, into freedom. in the show’s secondary structures—typical relational aesthetics targets The laudable, politically impeccable intentions of the plan really like audio guides, museum signage, and exhibition architecture. put a damper on the spirit of play theoretically encouraged by the art. What Liam Gillick’s theanyspacewhatever Signage System (2008) tweaked once had an air of good-natured prankishness was now made stolidly the didactics of the contemporary art museum by presenting a separate beneficial in a program of cultural edutainment. Acquiescing to the new set of viewer instructions, in the form of aluminum cutout signs whose arrangement left the viewer with some nagging questions. First there tone ranged from pseudo-informatic (“exterior information,” “books was the problem of activity and “mere passivity.” When asked to perform and materials,” “this way”) to wanly poetic (“deceptionist at lunch,” “stay in the overdetermined context of the pedagogical museum, the relational here sometimes”). Carsten Höller’s project—a wall-less hotel room in can often be mistaken for its dullard cousin, the interactive. In the show, which viewers could spend the night in the museum—was plagued by the I had plenty of opportunities for the latter—I ordered an espresso, fiddled reality of its limited availability and impossible waiting list. Tiravanija with headphones, sat on benches, flipped through books—while the himself was represented by a relatively tame (carpet, bean-bag chair, and former seemed increasingly remote, as elusive as art’s many other holy headphone) installation for a film,chew the fat (2008), which comprised grails. (I may as well have been in front of a Barnett Newman, attempting 75-minute interviews with the artists in the show and other peers. to experience pure opticality.) Was I doing it wrong? Is the spectator My favorite work, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Promenade (2007), necessarily passive in the traditional art-viewing transaction? More was a screened-off section of the Guggenheim’s ramp accompanied passive, say, than when taking off his shoes, sitting in a bean bag chair, by an ambient, rainforest-ish soundtrack, which magically and efficiently and watching the artists in the show reminisce about graduate school nullified the banal audiovisual din of the museum-going experience. But in Tiravanija’s film? Does spectating someone else’s freedom necessarily this seemed to have the least to do with the show’s declared goals: it wasn’t produce our own? 28 Roger White 29 paper monument

This brings us to the show’s second bad turn, toward the self- Shortly after seeing the show, I had a dream in which someone was referential. In an exhibition based on the premise that the author should telling me about a poem he had just read. He said it was incredibly moving ease up a little, and allow the viewer a larger, more participatory role in and life changing. I asked where I could find a copy of it, because, I said, the artwork, the frequency with which the artists showed up as the subject it sounded great and I would like to read it for myself. In response, this matter of their own work was pretty embarrassing. Their names, their person repeated his praise of the work: how deep it was, how much it had pictures, their biographies, their intentions: you just couldn’t get away changed his life, how just to read it was to be transformed. In turn I kept from these guys. asking, what is this poem? Who is this poet? Finally the person said, don’t Tiravanija’s making-of-“theanyspacewhatever” film represented you get it? This is it, idiot, we’re doing it. I’m reciting the poem and you’re the most straightforward example. Elsewhere, Jorge Pardo’s eponymous hearing it. I didn’t believe him at first, but after a while I accepted the Jorge Pardo Sculpture Ink (2008), created an exhibition-within-an- idea that I should be happy with this encounter, which was a “moment exhibition: freestanding cardboard walls were hung with multiples made of presence”—a phrase reiterated in the dream as if by a third party. I woke by other artists in the show—which often referred, again, to still more up feeling reconciled to some of the nagging problems of the show. (If you artists. This mania for name-checking made me nostalgic for the can’t convince your unconscious, who can you convince?) I felt, in fact, like mute objects of the traditional, passive art experience: you could at least I’d finally managed to exit the building. forge your own relationship with those. In the Guggenheim, the idea of a shared, exploratory elaboration of meaning was constantly evoked, but seemed to exist primarily among the artists in the show, only 1 Ilya Kabakov, O n t h e “ To t a l 4 geoff Edgers, “Mass MoCA 7 Nancy Spector, representable to the spectator indirectly, in static forms. The actual Installation,” ( C a n t z , 19 9 2 ) . to Dismantle Unseen Exhibit,” “theanyspacewhatever: 2 Svetlana Boym, “Ilya Kabakov: the Boston Globe, A n E x h i b i t i o n i n Te n P a r t s ,” content of our experience was the vicarious enjoyment of the The Soviet Toilet and the September 26, 2007. theanyspacewhatever, creative lifestyle. P a l a c e o f U t o p i a s ,” h t t p : / / 5 Randy Kennedy, “Accusations, Guggenheim Museum, 2008. The most efficient illustration of this phenomenon was Philippe www.artmargins.com, 1999. Depositions: Just More Fodder 8 Ibid. Parreno’s Audioguide ii, Guggenheim, ny (2008), which replaced the 3 blogger Martin Bromirski has for Art,” the N e w Y o r k T i m e s , 9 Ibid. assembled a comprehensive M a r c h 2 , 2 0 0 8 . 10 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational now-ubiquitous tape-recorded, educational tour of the exhibition with index of journalistic and critical 6 for a discussion of Büchel’s work Aesthetics, Les Presses a recording of world-champion word-memorizer Boris Konrad attempting c o v e r a g e o f Tr a i n i n g G r o u n d f o r a n d t h e V i s u a l A r t i s t s R i g h t s du réel, 2002. to recite the exhibition histories and iconic works of all the artists in the Democracy and its ongoing legal Act, see Virginia Rutledge, show. The piece was textbook relational aesthetics: it recast the artwork narrative: http://anaba.blogspot. “Institutional Critique,” Artforum, com/search/label/Christoph M a r c h , 2 0 0 8 . as situational, invisible, and peripheral to the exhibition. It also recast the Buchel. artist as a detached facilitator rather than an expressive author. (Parreno cannily outsourced the traditional role of the artist—to demonstrate a remarkable skill—to Konrad, while orchestrating his performance from the sidelines.) But while busy removing himself from the form of the work, Parreno magically reappears in the work’s contents, represented in the collective milieu the Audioguide documents. This gesture of skewed self-reference seems to poke fun at the dialectical language of modernism to which the Guggenheim, with its somewhat Hegelian spiral, is a temple. If the modernist teleology of art, in its self-critical ascent into purity, culminated in the production of exquisitely refined tautologies (a painting is about the nature of painting and nothing else, a sculpture is about the nature of sculpture and nothing else), Parreno’s work responded by turning this dialectical spiral into a closed, self-recursive loop (the artwork is about the artist who makes the artwork, which is about the artist who makes the artwork…). The effect was less like being invited into the shared space of the exhibition than being trapped within the glass of a revolving door.