Roger M. Buergel, curator of Documenta 12, talks about power, art, politics, and philosophy. Valerie Connor elaborates on his influences and speculates on why he feels making exhibitions is useful.

In the belief that the "journal, and more specifically the art and culture journal, is a medium uniquely devoted to reflecting the relationships between art and theory, and between art and the public, as well as dealing with the issues involved in artistic practice and theoretical work," the first formal project to begin as part of Documenta 12 was announced at the start of this year.¹ In the period running up to and as part of the exhibition in Kassel in 2007, the Documenta 12 magazine project is being led by Georg Schöllhammer, a co-founder of the magazine, springerin. By bringing together an editorial team to act as a curatorial network, the magazine project aims to work with at least seventy print and online periodicals throughout the world, where the main themes and theories behind Documenta 12 will be discussed and reflected upon within the local contexts of the partner publications. The debates that arise (and the texts central to them) will be compiled in a journal of journals. The appearance of the first publication from this project is scheduled for spring 2006.

Of this project in the longer term, there is the question of whether the possibility of sustainable information infrastructures, databases, and other communication tools will be realised. As to how this project of inquiry or research activity begins, Schöllhammer has presented these initial questions: What does cultural transmission mean? Where are the boundaries between theoretical assumptions and actual aesthetic practice? What form do discourses take in alleged centres as opposed to putative peripheral areas? Which shifts in thematic emphasis and changes in paradigm can be ascertained between various disciplines? How does the concept of artistic work differ from other kinds of work, if at all? How does artistic theory differ from practice, and from other kinds of texts, for example from literature and politics, etc.?²

These questions were presaged by those posed by Documenta 12's curator, Roger M. Buergel, during his visit to Dublin late last year as part of Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane's public series of international lectures. At intervals in his lecture, Buergel put the following questions to the audience: Can we use the aesthetic experience to get out from under the capitalist imperative? Can we use art / the aesthetic experience in order to get out of capitalist immanence, for example? Is there any difference between aesthetic relationality and capitalist relationality? Does art offer us a different way to perceive of relations, which are not under the imperative of capital, an artistic practice that is doing something beneath representation that is enacting something - collaboration? I will return to the implications of these questions at the conclusion of this article.

In the course of his lecture, hosted by the National College of Art and Design, Buergel advocated resisting the production of endless commentary in catalogues, remarked that the bankruptcy of the higher education system was now probably beyond reform or redemption, suggested the appropriation strategies of the 1980s hadn't worked out so well, and that audiences have mistakenly come to think they should get modern art, that they have to understand something, and that they want something in return. Nevertheless, it became apparent in his presentation and in subsequent conversations that he is an optimist who clearly privileges theories and ideas that are basically hopeful and imaginative in their intent and consequence.

Ostensibly about the series of exhibitions developed as part of the long-term curatorial project The Government,³ Buergel's Dublin lecture brought to the fore the numerous interconnected and intellectually related propositions that inform his aesthetic practice: "To me, aesthetics is a philosophical discipline but it goes hand in hand with art historical research - useful in making distance with contemporary art."⁴ The public lecture was premised on the question of whether the exhibition is a curatorial method or an aesthetic experience. On making exhibitions, it is Buergel's contention that exhibitions can display information and data not otherwise available through other media. Where this is the case the exhibition is an act of resistance. His primary historical example of this is Tucumán Arde.⁵ In 1968, in Tucumán, in Argentina, a group of artists (already disillusioned with the institutionalised avant-gardism of the art academy) made an exhibition in response to the effects of economic hardships arising locally out of the closure of the area's sugar factories. As Buergel describes it, the Tucumán Arde artists were also confronted with the inadequacy of their conceptual approach to the situation they found, so they used the exhibition as a form to organise a kind of resistance.⁶

Exhibition

Buergel's general interest in the idea of 'governmentality', a concept theorised by Michel Foucault (1926 - 1984), is central to his curatorial method and his recognition that there is an ethical dimension to aesthetics. For the Barcelona part of The Government project in particular, Buergel testified to the way the collaboration between local groups and the artists determined the form of the exhibition and was a good example of how relationships are formalised through the medium of the exhibition.⁷ Moreover, he was "dealing with the effect cultural policies have on the city's infrastructure and it was clear from the beginning that this show had to be outside the museum proper." Locally, around the contemporary art museum that invited Buergel to curate the exhibition there, there was "huge resistance" against the "erasure of history" perceived to be the outcome of the gentrification of the surrounding area and it became apparent that there was "quite a heterogeneous bunch of groups fighting this kind of manipulation of collective memory and material history."⁸ In contrast to general preoccupations with spatial and architectural issues in most critical approaches to exhibition making, he sets about temporalising it, like, he says, a film (more than just running shows simultaneously).

Buergel describes the exhibition as a medium that he uses creatively because an exhibition always has the potential to show how shifts in the ontological register are played out. The exhibition is a structure that may allow certain things to happen: "what you get...is a sense of intertextuality, which is in my view extremely important to make an exhibition readable...to connect things without being forced to give endless commentaries in catalogues or in whatever format."⁹ Being particularly concerned with the implications of exhibition making, Buergel is also forthright about the ethical implications of the relations between artist, curator, and audience. These relations are about power, but have a complexity that means the relation is not simply one of friendship or dictatorship. The audience determines the exhibition as much as they are determined by it. Despite its centrality, however, he does not believe that audience participation can be pinned down empirically, and this seems to be a good thing by his account. With reference to working with institutions and how his method can be a hassle for institutional frameworks, he points out that the source of anxiety, being in control, if given up means you are on an equal level with the artist. It is all about negotiation. Moreover as the exhibition is an institution in itself it is most useful to think about institutions as agents of resistance rather than only about power and establishment. Referring to Foucault's thoughts on how individuals are governmentalised because the state works through individuals, Buergel concludes that to govern, then, is to structure the possible field of action of others. This, he says, is a nice definition of any exhibition and a working definition of curatorial methods that actively take the audience into account. Consequently, the exhibition is envisaged as an act of government, an act that causes or provokes other actions.

Buergel frequently cites Leo Bersani, who has written of how the avant-garde assertion that art is life shows an extraordinary optimism because it confers on art the power to promote revolutions in the self and in the world.¹⁰ It is Bersani's view that art is possibly the only mode by which we can see ourselves in relation to others. Buergel is unperturbed by the general idea that the subject of correspondences or relationality - where everything is connected including art - is essentially a romantic one. Buergel also regularly cites Kaja Silverman vis-à-vis her exploration of how correspondences of forms are at the heart of the aesthetic of modernity. Buergel speaks of Bersani and Silverman's challenges to conservatism. Silverman in turn has cited Bersani and his collaborator Ulysse Dutoit as fellow travellers in their assertion that nothing escapes connectedness, the play of and between forms. Bersani has suggested that it is simply in the moment one body meets another in space that we understand we are not isolated from other creatures and things and that we are in a state of perpetual implicit communication.¹¹ In suggesting that it can be quite nice to get rid of yourself and see yourself replicated inaccurately in the forms of the world, as Bersani describes it, it is understandable too that Buergel's would appreciate Bersani's description of aesthetic experience as one involved in the creation of subjectivity that extends beyond ourselves, because we see shadows of ourselves in other people and things (forms) and that this in turn gives us (I would say, critical) distance.

Education

Of education, Buergel stresses the importance of self-education through research and analysis, and the creation of strong collaborative activity. Self-education, he holds, is extremely important in order to not only guarantee access to data and to research, but to formalise the information gathered in ways that are specific and relevant to a specific situation. Do this, he urges, to counter the dominion of the media over representations of the truth, and the fallacy that the truth can ever be an object of knowledge. Rather than specialise and emphasise the boundaries between different discrete areas of thought, Buergel want to erase these boundaries. Elaborating on his opinion that "the whole issue of education is somehow getting lost," much like "exhibition making is turning into hokum didacticism, which doesn't work because it governs people too much," he has pointed to the Bologna Process. This better puts into context his view that "the system of higher education is more or less bankrupt and it's pretty clear it's unable to reform itself." Signatories, including Ireland, began the Bologna Process by signing a Declaration in 1999 aimed to create a European Higher Education Area by 2010, which would provide Europe with a broad, high-quality and advanced knowledge base, and ensures the further development of Europe as a stable, peaceful and tolerant community. Nevertheless, in the process of formalising this aim, the Process has been criticised for having an instrumental approach to education predicated on market economics. This year, in an interim report by Ireland on the implementation of the Process, it is stated that, for example, vis-à-vis life-long learning the State and citizens will work in partnership to achieve the skills, motivation, supports, tools, resources, and time to enrich lives and develop a more prosperous, more inclusive society.¹² It is not without significance that an easily overlooked detail in the conclusion of the report describes Ireland as an off-shore island. Buergel sees the problem with education now in its choice to respond to market demands and so be formed by them. He contests that as the demand then goes by the wayside, people are left with no general education because it is becoming increasingly instrumental and narrow.

Research

Further underpinning the notion of a knowledge economy as a viable political idea has been the establishment of the European Research Area. Created in 2000, ERA aims at the creation of better overall framework conditions for research to make Europe the leading knowledge-based economy worldwide. As alternative research methods to those sanctioned by officialdom, the pursuit of independent or other kinds of knowledge through militant research, participatory research, or advocacy research are examples of how method has been to the forefront in formulating ways to contest knowledge. While Buergel acknowledges the necessity of research in self-education, and mentions the important role militant research plays or has played, he is somewhat sceptical of any claim to the truth. Perhaps a clue to this lies in his scepticism about tendencies to reinvest in limited identity constructs. On this point, Bersani has recently stated that the viability of aesthetic subject-hood remains unknown, and that we have still to invent relational regimes no longer dependent on identitarian myths.¹³ Buergel notes that of course the "big three" of class, race, and gender are important, but if only used as tools to produce reductive knowledge they are insufficient. He sees the area of academic cultural studies as being largely unaware of its role in the appropriation of the world, turning anything and everything into an area of study. Bersani, thirty years ago, wrote that attempts to join a new scientism to movements of social revolution were reactionary. Furthermore, he challenged Roland Barthes' semiotic approach, especially in his analysis of fashion and advertising.¹⁴ Bersani berates Barthes for presenting language as something so codified it is essentially unavailable to unpredictability and human creativity, and is instead emphatically bound to processes of indirection and deception.¹⁵

Work

Last year, Schöllhammer's magazine, spingerin, featured an interview with the activist and historian Sergio Bologna. The authors of the interview article (Schöllhammer is one) note in their preliminary comments that because of the social upheavals of the past two decades conventional professional and class identities have been invalidated and the traditional forms of collective solidarity which once arose from the common experience of work under alienated conditions are vanishing.¹⁶ Further to the historical perception of this change, Bologna goes on to describe the consequences of this as evident in the specificity of the new forms of work to the character of knowledge. Certainly, by now, the concept of the knowledge economy has become generally normalised in its usage by media pundits as something meaningful and aspirational, as well as in the type of market-friendly rhetoric common to the most visible political parties in Ireland for over a decade. Elsewhere, Bologna is documented as expressing the view that the essay, review article, and the book, are finding an increasingly distant echo within society. Consequently, he believes that it is worth considering whether it would make more sense to work collectively on a film, or a song, rather than an essay or a book.¹⁷ The link isn't explicit, but there is something to this that makes making exhibitions, and seeing them as a medium and as places of invigoration, that explains why the art historian and aesthetician Buergel would spend years putting his exhibitions together. The springerin interview asserts that social resistance has a hard time now finding an answer to the new and flexible strategies of post-Fordian capitalism. This is because in the case of individuals who act as entrepreneurs of their own labour - the self-employed and the freelancers - the new forms of work have brought about such temporal and spatial shifts that the people working in them do not, and cannot, express their ideas or demands for a better life in the language of unions, for example. If freelancers want to work less, from whom do they demand a shortening of working hours?¹⁸ To bolster his point, and to extend it to the problem of representation, Bologna directs his interviewers' attention to their own work (Schöllhammer included) on present-day art.

Form

Bologna asks how can one photograph the work of a freelancer? He points out that a certain aesthetic of factory work developed through the relationship between industrial photography and Fordist workforces and workplaces. Consequently, anyone involved in the teaching or learning of history and photography as they occur in the same breath, will recognise that photographs of steel works, shipyards, and assembly lines are established sources of information on industrial history. Furthermore, pictures of miners and female textile workers are sources for the history and perception of exploitation. But how, Bologna asks, can one illustrate the history of the New Economy? How can one find professional pride in the face of a freelancer? How can one photograph her psychological destructuring after long years of work in front of a computer screen? And how can one give an account of something today that cannot be represented in visual form? When storytelling fails, historiography is difficult and there is thus a twofold danger: on the one hand, the 'no-past' ideology, on the other, the undepictable nature of the new.¹⁹

While writing about James Coleman's work for an exhibition catalogue, Silverman writes that photography interpolates us formally, as well as spatially and ideologically. She gives the example of how when someone reaches for a camera, most of us freeze into an anticipatory still. She makes the claim that Coleman teaches us that photography is an ontological as well as an egoic affair.²⁰ As it happens, Buergel translated this text for Silverman. Also, he has included Coleman's work in The Government exhibitions. That Buergel might see the formal attitude struck by the type of photography alluded to by Bologna as being repeated in Walter Evans' photography is reinforced by his sentiment that Evans et al. failed to provide their subjects with dignity. He is also of the view that the strategy of enabling the dispossessed, disenfranchised, disempowered, and marginalised by giving them the technology to make representations of their own isolation is the failure of "the social democratic" approach which "is useless, I think, because, it might help to create quite complacent communities as a technology of government and control," and "it stays within the limits of a system or a social structure but when you want to get rid of the social structure then this is simply not enough."²¹

Silverman draws comparisons between the fleeting echoes and resonances which link words and visual forms to each other in Coleman's work and the synaesthetic form of Charles Baudelaire's symbolist poem Correspondences.²² The widespread fascination with Baudelaire's poem is certainly enhanced by Walter Benjamin's later interest in both it and its author, who penned 'The Painter of Modern Life' about six years after Correspondences was published in Flowers of Evil, in 1857. Silverman celebrates the arbitrariness of the sign, and the temporary and subjective nature of formal linkages, and defends these qualities as essential to our sense of being in the world, a world outside of ourselves.²³ Explaining, during his Dublin lecture, how the formal elements within exhibition display correspond to the modes of display used by the artists in their works to draw our attention out into the world, Buergel may have been thinking about Bersani and Dutoit's assertion that Carravaggio directed our attention beyond the frame of his paintings, to unpainted spaces that are extensions of formal elements within the paintings.²⁴

The belief in form as a primary organising and disorganising principle in our lives is developed in modern aesthetics in parallel with the development of modern political theory and ideas about the sovereignty of the state and the individual. Immanuel Kant's idealist philosophy draws a correlation between judicious reason and aesthetic subjectivity. This is central to the history of how Enlightenment values have been formed and formalised, and is very important in Foucault's general work. It follows that his critique of the institutions and imagination of the Enlightenment informs Buergel's method. As this is discussed by Buergel and others, and will surely generate more commentary in the run up to Documenta, there is no real purpose in making an exposition on this here. Instead, there is another connection worth bringing up, I believe, to better understand where Buergel's method stems from.

Both Silverman and Bersani draw on psychoanalytical theory to a greater or lesser extent in their writings about art. In the development of his own nascent scientific method, Sigmund Freud draws on the dream analyses of Robert Vischer and, by association, Karl Albert Scherner who published their treatises in the latter half of the nineteenth-century.²⁵ Kant's definition of form, stated almost a century earlier, allows that certain relations are ordered through appearance.²⁶ For Vischer, the experience of empathy involves the merging of our whole personality with the object, a kinaesthetic empathy predicated on ideas of motion. Like plot chapters and film frames, sequential images, it can be argued, are, in their relation to one another through correspondences of form, technologies quintessentially appropriate to modernity.²⁷ In 1873, Vischer wrote of the higher emotion experienced when forms have been touched by the consecration of loving kindness and human sentiment.²⁸ Such is his idealism.

Relationality

Finally, on Buergel's questions about the difference between capitalist and aesthetic relationality, I think it's worth thinking about how, in 1922, George Lukács described the commodity structure as having its basis in the way relations between people take on the character of things. This, he argues, leads to the more fundamental relations between people being obscured. Quoting from the first volume of Karl Marx's Capital, published in German in 1867, Lukács draws attention to Marx's idea that the commodity appears as a mysterious thing because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them only as a social relation between the products of their labour and not as a relation between themselves.²⁹ Silverman has also described how the value of the commodity, capitalism's object par excellence, functions much as meaning does in Baroque drama. The value of the commodity is extrinsic, she claims. It is the result of a relationship between it and something else.³⁰ As for Buergel, he ultimately contrasts capitalist relationality, which allows you to appropriate objects for a certain price, and aesthetic relationality, where you never get the object but where you have a chance to transform yourself.³¹

Buergel has made use of the Documenta archive in planning Documenta 12. He makes the point that Documenta 1, in 1955, was about improvisation and does not believe the value of Documenta lies in spectacle. Moreover, it is his contention that Documenta should be seen in relation to Nazi Germany. Documenta 1 directly addressed the Nazi propaganda exhibition Degenerate Art, held in 1937. One year earlier, in 1936, Buergel points out, it was by the removal of their legal status under the Nuremburg Laws that the Nazis began to strip people of their subjectivity and remove them from public life, from public culture, and return them to a natural order in the basest terms. Hannah Arendt, who had already explored the idea of the human condition and the workings of justice within the 'space of appearance', was appalled nevertheless when Adolf Eichmann, on trial for the part he played in the genocides of Nazi government, cited Kant's aesthetics as a source of moral guidance.³²

In conclusion, Buergel states that the quality of the exhibition stems from the quality of discussions had prior to it. This is almost certainly the rationale that underscores the magazine project and will distinguish it from being nothing but endless commentary. Moreover, drawing attention to the call that Documenta should be curated by an artist, Buergel has replied that you could just as well say that Documenta should be curated by a cat, that "it's not a question of professional identity, but one of method."³³ Are these salutary words for anyone seeking training and professional qualifications in curating? So what of Buergel's position as the curator of Documenta 12? For him, the point, or purpose of his approach, is to reach an audience. He explains that it is not for him "to spare the museum or to make it better." Nevertheless, he concludes that "of course...you need people who agree about this kind of methodology." And he is optimistic.³⁴

Valerie Connor has worked on various exhibition, publishing, and curatorial projects in collaboration with other artists and writers; she was the Commissioner for the Republic of Ireland at the 50th Venice Biennale and the 26th São Paulo Bienal, is a Corresponding Editor for Contemporary magazine, and teaches in Photography at the Dublin Institute of Technology.

This article is based on the public talk given by Roger M. Buergel in Dublin on 21 October 2004 at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and subsequent interviews with him by the author over the following days, arranged by Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane. The author would like to thank Christina Kennedy and Mick O'Kelly. Only views expressed by Roger Buergel are recorded as direct quotations and marked accordingly in the text, while other views are paraphrased and attributed to the relevant author in the footnotes. In 2004, Roger M. Buergel was appointed as the curator of Documenta 12, Kassel, in 2007.

¹Archived at documenta12.de

²ibid.

³The Government was begun by Roger Buergel with a seminar series in 1998 at the Kunstraum of the Universität Lüneburg, and culminated in exhibitions there, and in Barcelona, Miami, Vienna, and Rotterdam, between 2003 and 2005.

⁴Interview between the author and Roger Buergel, Dublin.

⁵Public lecture by Roger Buergel, Dublin. More on Tucumán Arde archived at www.rosariarte.com.ar/notas/0002/. See also Tucumán burns, by María Gramuglio and Nicolás Rosa, in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000, pp. 76-79.

⁶See also Buergel's co-authored article on the 2004 exhibition ExArgentina, which included contributions from the militant research group Colectivo Situationes and b_books, in springerin, Issue 2, 2004, available at springerin.at/en.

7How do We Want to be Governed? was the third instalment in the five-part project, The Government, which began in 2003, at the Kunstraum of the Universität Lüneburg.

⁸Public lecture by Roger Buergel, Dublin.

⁹ibid.

¹⁰Leo Bersani, Introduction, Balzac to Beckett: Centre and Circumference in French Fiction, [dedicated to Ulysse Dutoit], New York: Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 15

¹¹Kaja Silverman, World Spectators: Cultural Memory in the Present [dedicated to Leo Bersani], Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 142

¹²Ian McKenna, National Report 2004 - 2005, Dublin: HETAC, HEA, NQAI, DIT, CoDIT, USI, CHIU & Department of Education and Science, 2005, pp. 12 - 13, available at bologna-bergen2005.no/EN/national_impl/00_Nat-rep-05/National_Reports-Ireland_050120.pdf

¹³Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, I don't see (woe is me), in Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity, London: BFI, 2004, p. 9

¹⁴In an interview for the Tel Quel review in 1971, Barthes explained that the book alluded to by Bersani, The Fashion Sense (1967), obeyed a scientific impulse but that in hindsight the deductive view of applying semiotics to clothes, food, the city, etc., seemed to Barthes to in fact be naïve. See The Tel Quel Reader, London: Routledge, 1998, p. 260.

¹⁵Leo Bersani, Toward an esthetic of disappearance? epilogue and prelude, Balzac to Beckett, op. cit., pp. 331 - 332

¹⁶Klaus Ronneberger and Georg Schöllhammer, No past? No! An interview with the Italian analyst of post-Fordism, Sergio Bologna, in springerin, Issue 4, 2001, available at springerin.at/en

¹⁷Sergio Bologna, Eight theses on militant historiography [translated by Ed Emery], viewed at emery.archive.mcmail.com/public_html/sergio_bologna/historiography.html

¹⁸ibid.

¹⁹ibid.

²⁰Kaja Silverman, James Coleman [translated by Roger M. Buergel], Ostfildern Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002, pp. 113 - 114

²¹Interview between the author and Roger Buergel, Dublin

²²Silverman, op. cit., p.108

²³ibid., p.109

²⁴Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity, London: BFI, 2004, p. 1

²⁵Robert Vischer, On the optical sense of form (1873), in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics 1873 - 1893 [translated by Harry Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou], Santa Monica: Getty Centre for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994, pp. 89 - 117

²⁶'Appearance' in the history of philosophy connotes the relationship between perception and reality.

²⁷See Michaële Cutaya, For a Baroque Aesthetic: a Study of the Films of David Lynch, [unpublished MA thesis], Dublin: NCAD, for an excellent insight into the relationship of form to film based on Heinrich Wölfflin's writings on the baroque and Gilles Deleuze's theories of cinema.

²⁸Robert Vischer, op. cit., p. 122

²⁹From György Lukács, The phenomenon of reification (1922), reproduced in Lukács on Marx: Georg Lukács, in Modern Critical Thought, edited by Drew Milne, London: Blackwell, 2003

³⁰Kaja Silverman, op. cit., p.109

³¹Interview between the author and Roger Buergel, Dublin

³²See Juliet Flower MacCannell, Fascism and the voice of conscience, in Radical Evil, edited by Joan Copjec, London: Verso, 1996

³³See Jens Hoffman, The Next Documenta Should be Curated by an Artist, New York / Frankfurt: Revolver, 2004, and the online project at e-flux.com

³⁴Interview between the author and Roger Buergel, Dublin

Article reproduced from CIRCA 113, Autumn 2005, pp 41 - 48
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