Head

Prof. Dr. Gregor Stemmrich

Research Associates

Fiona McGovern, M.A. / Marie-France Rafael, M.A. / Dr. Jörn Schafaff

Student Assistant

Celina Basra / Tina Gebler

Objective

In recent discourse on art, the concept of the display is employed for types of presentation not only in institutional but also in commercial and mass-media contexts. It applies both to methods and technologies as well as to the field of perception constructed with their help, in which the information and objects presented are arranged in a specific way. The display relates the art and the viewer; they are components of a situation whose setup suggests a certain behavior and thus shapes the aesthetic experience of the art. This project will study how art does not simply initiate aesthetic experiences but at the same time also refers to its own situation, by itself performing the strategies and structures of initiating and referring and thereby giving impetus to processes of judgment that concern both these strategies and the aesthetic experiences they make possible. The reciprocal perspectives of the terms situation and display ensure that the experience initiated as part of the work (as situation) can turn out to include a critique of the traditional object-centered understanding of the work.Until now, these terms have usually been placed separately in a thematic focus and hence related closely in each case to specific art phenomena or phenomena in the context of art. For example, the concept of the situation developed in the 1960s by the Situationist International is treated entirely independently of the concept of situation developed at the same time in the context of the American discourse on art in the form of situational aesthetics. The developments in art since the 1990s to be studied in this project are, however, part of both these traditions. The concept of the display is discussed primarily in relation to exhibitions. The focus is on curatorial practice. This project, by contrast, studies how artistic practice relates to it. When artists adopt and defamiliarize the properties, attributions, and effects of displays, they do more than shed light on the suggestive character of the display and its critical intention with regard to ideology—both in the field of art and in other cultural areas. They also use their potential to guide behavior and create meaning themselves in order to offer experiences, communicate information, and initiate processes of knowledge generation. The thesis of the project is that such art does not simply adopt the character of a display but also constructs situations that concern the effects of displays and make us conscious of them. The artistic display is shifted situationally into a corporeal perspective and at the same time refers to its encodings in culture.Our research focuses on art projects form the 1990s when the institutional conditions of exhibition once again moved to the center of artistic interest but under changed cultural, social, and political circumstances. The goal is to place them in a genealogical perspective of artistic strategies of display and situationally oriented art since the early twentieth century but especially since the 1960s.

Subproject 1: The Art of Oscillation: Display/Situations as Ways of Thematizing Behavior Oneself

(Dr. Jörn Schafaff)

In the 1990s artists such as Liam Gillick, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija construct situations that are ultimately only indicated by diverse “framing devices,” so that the “viewer” is obliged to determine their purpose him- or herself and relate in and to them accordingly. In the process, such artists build on postminimalist discourses but also develop the concept of the “construction of situations” that was explored intently by the Situationist International (SI) at the beginning of the 1960s, relating both to insights and methods from institutional critique. Other points of reference include the strategies with which the Pop Art of the 1960s and the so-called Simulationists of the 1980s appropriated commercial and media display formats. SP 1 begins with the question of how the conceptions and strategic options of SI and minimalist art, which initially were completely different, could intersect in the artistic positions of the 1990s. This question also takes into account the criticism of minimalist art in the postminimalist movements and even more so in the debate over postmodernism. Building on that, the subproject will study how elements of a history of discourse and a contemporary cultural context are related to each other in such a way that the displays/situations constructed as art (can) become the test bench for the behavior of those who participate in them. The project will focus in particular on the question of how contextual relations and situation-oriented behavior seem to refer aesthetically to each other in the processes of judgment that are initiated in this way, so that what has been aptly called the “art of oscillation” (Vattimo 1982) can emerge.

Subproject 2: Context-Reflexive and Media Displays in Situations Constructed as Art

(Fiona McGovern, M.A. and Marie-France Rafael, M.A.)

On the one hand, artistic displays, produce effects of recognition of “models” common in the culture but defamiliarize them in such a way that the viewers feel perplexed in their effort to understand. Hence they are obliged to focus their attention on the situation to which the display itself belongs and at the same time to ask which situations are evoked, commented on, or initiated by the display. SP 2 studies the resulting relationship of tension in relation to two different forms of artistic practice. The first form is based on a defamiliarization and recasting with regards to contents of the display format of an art exhibition. Taking as examples large-scale works by Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, and Manfred Pernice, it will study the rhetorical strategies used to compile information and objects, of both artistic and nonartistic origin, following the example of curatorial procedures to create exhibitions and works of art that recall exhibitions (McGovern). The second form is based on the employment of display formats from the mass media that relate the exhibition situation to artistic activities that the audience cannot observe directly. It is studied in relation to examples of works of art by Pierre Huyghe, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and other artists that in an initial phase had the character of journeys, trails, or explorations recorded with the help of film or video, treated narratively, and transferred to the exhibition (Rafael). In the first case, the viewers find themselves at the “place of the art event”; in the second, they are excluded from it. In each case, however, they sense that an artistic display has indicated to them that they can only understand their present situation by relating it to the idea of other situations. The subproject studies how the structural aspects of the resulting relationship of tension relate to the structure of the aesthetic experience and how they point the aesthetic experience to its own situation.