Post-Internet Curating
By Boris Groys
The word present can be understood in at least two different ways. Thus, we can speak about the presence of the present—about the ways in which the world presents itself to us. It is a traditional topic of philosophy. From Plato through Heidegger and until our own time one mostly thematized the experience of here and now, the immediate openness of the world to our senses. But speaking about our relationship to the world, we can also ask a different question: How do we present ourselves to the world? In other words, we can reverse the usual subject/object relationship: Instead of asking how do we see the world, we would ask how does the world see us? Obviously, it is a more difficult, dangerous, and even fateful question because the way in which the world sees us determines our place in the world—in some cases it is a question of life and death. Here the present takes a form of contemporaneity. Contemporaneity is the synchronization of my personal time and the world time—and it is not always reflected on and consciously practiced. Often enough I overlook the world—being immersed in my own private problems. And the world seems not to be interested in me, not to like me, and not to target me. But there are also moments in which I take a conscious effort of synchronization between myself and the world in a twofold way: I look at the world and let the world look at me.
In our own present the primary medium of such an operation of conscious synchronization is the Internet. Indeed, when we ask ourselves what is happening in the world right now we mostly turn to the Internet. And when we want to let the world know who we are and what we are thinking or doing we post some information about our own life on the social media. The genealogy of the Internet started with the press—with newspapers and magazines. Today, however, the Internet has made the technology of media coverage potentially accessible to every individual. Everyone can use photo or video cameras to produce images, write commentaries to them, and distribute the results on a global scale—avoiding any censorship or selection process. In this respect, the Internet functions not so much as a medium of information but, rather, as an artistic medium. Indeed, in our culture art is the privileged medium of self-presentation: through art the subject practices self-objectivation and, thus, offers itself to approval or rejection by the world society. So, one could believe that in the age of the Internet the traditional art institutions—with all their rituals of selection and presentation—became obsolete.
However, in our time one can see the growth of the museums of contemporary art all over the world, and one registers the fact that the public of the big exhibitions of contemporary art, such as Venice Biennale or documenta in Kassel, is also permanently growing. Why is it so? If one asks people who are not professionally involved into art why they are going to these big, global exhibitions they usually answer: We want to see what happens in the contemporary world. So let me now discuss and compare these two very different mediums: the Internet and the global art exhibition.
Let us begin with the Internet. At first glance, the Internet seems to be global, universal. And it is how many people still see it. But after some years of the Internet’s functioning it is becoming increasingly evident that the space of the Internet is not unified and universal but, rather, extremely fragmented. Of course, under its current regime all Internet data is globally accessible. But in practice the Internet leads not to the emergence of the universal public space but to the tribalization of the public. The reason for that is very simple. The Internet reacts to the user’s questions—to the user’s clicks. In other words, the user only finds what he or she wants to find on the Internet. The Internet is, actually, an extremely narcissistic medium—it is a mirror of our specific interests and desires. It does not show us what we do not want to see. In the context of social media we also communicate mostly with people who share our interests and attitude—be it political or aesthetic attitudes. Thus, the non-selective character of the Internet is an illusion. The factual functioning of the Internet is based on the non-explicit rules of selection according to which the users select only what they already know or are familiar with. Of course, some search programs are able to go through the whole Internet. But these programs also always have particular goals and are controlled by big corporations and not the individual users. In this respect, the Internet is the opposite of, let say, an urban space where we constantly have to see what we do not necessarily want to see. In many cases we try to ignore these unwanted images and impressions, in many cases they provoke our interest, but in any case we expand our field of experience in this way.
Now let me suggest that the curatorial choices may also let us see what we would not choose to see, what even was unknown to us. Indeed, these choices are interesting and productive when they are transgressive, when they cross the usual boundaries of websites and chat groups. One hears time and again that contemporary art is elitist because it is selective—and that it should be put under control of a democratic public. Yes, indeed, there is a certain gap between the contemporary art exhibition practice and the tastes and expectations of the audience. The reason for that is simple: The audience of every particular exhibition is local—but the exhibited art is often international. That means: Contemporary art does not have a narrow, elitist but, on the contrary, a broader, universalist perspective, which can irritate the local audiences. It is the same kind of irritation that nowadays migration provokes in European countries. Many people also say that the acceptance of migration is “elitist”. Here we are confronted with the same phenomenon: The broader, internationalist attitude is experienced by the local audiences as elitist—even if the migrants themselves are far from belonging to any kind of elite.
We are living within a system of nation states. The societies of these states are, in their turn, divided along the lines of different cultural identities and their particular interests—and these divisions are also reflected in the fragmentation of the Internet. But inside every national culture there are institutions that embody the universalist, transnational projects. Among them are universities and art museums. Indeed, the European museums were from their beginnings the universalist institutions—they wanted to present the universal art history and not only the national art history. Of course, one can argue that this universalist project reflected the imperial policies of the European states in the nineteenth century. And to some extent it is true—but only to some extent. The European museum system has its origin in the French Revolution. It was the French Revolution that turned things earlier used by the Church and aristocracy into the artworks, i.e. into the objects that were exhibited in the museum, originally in the Louvre, only to be looked at. The secularism of the French Revolution abolished the contemplation of God as the highest goal in life and substituted it with the contemplation of “beautiful” material objects. One could say, art itself was produced by revolutionary violence and was from its beginnings a modern form of iconoclasm. European museums began to aesthetically suspend their own cultural traditions before they aestheticized and suspended non-European cultural traditions.
It is this revolutionary transformation of the Louvre that Kant has in mind when he writes in his Critique of the Power of Judgment: “If someone asks me whether I find the palace that I see before me beautiful, I may well say that I do not like that sort of thing […]; in true Rousseauesque style I might even vilify the vanity of the great who waste the sweat of the people on such superfluous things […] All of this might be conceded to me and approved; but that is not what is at issue here […] One must not be in the least biased in favor of the existence of the thing, but must be entirely indifferent in this respect in order to play the judge in the matter of taste.”1
Actually, the protection of art objects can be compared to the social-political protection of the human body. I mean the protection through the human rights—also introduced by the French Revolution. There is a close relationship between art and humanism. According to the principles of humanism, the human being can be only contemplated—but not actively used: killed, violated, enslaved, etc. The humanist program was summarized by Kant through the famous formulation: In the enlightened, secular society man is supposed to be never treated as a means but only as a goal. That is why we see slavery as barbaric. But to use an artwork in the same way as we use other things and commodities also means to act in a barbaric way. And what is most important here: Humans are defined by the secular gaze only as objects having a certain, namely, human form. The human gaze does not see the human soul—that was the privilege of God. The human gaze sees only the human body. Thus, our rights are related to the image that we offer to the gaze of others. That is why we are so much interested in this image. And that is also why we are interested in the protection of art and being protected by art.
Now our current museums of modern and contemporary art are not only heirs of the nineteenth-century museums but also of the strategies of the avant-garde. The artists of the avant-garde rejected their national cultural identities. They wanted their art to become universalist, to develop a visual language that would be accessible to everyone beyond the traditional cultural borders. Modern and contemporary art museums are heirs of this project. The museum is selective. But museum’s selection should be, so to say, anti-selection, transgressive selection. In this sense, this curatorial selection re-instates the universalist project of the modern and contemporary museum. Here the selection does not create fragmentation rather, on the contrary, works against it by creating a unified space of representation in which the different fragments of offline culture and of the Internet become equally represented.
However, the universalist project does not have political, institutional support today because the universal, global state does not exist. So one can say that the contemporary art system plays a role in the symbolic substitution of such a universal state by organizing biennials, documentas, and other exhibitions that have a claim to present universal, global art and culture—that means art and culture of the non-existent, utopian global state. Our time is characterized by a lack of balance between political and economic powers, between public institutions and commercial practices. Our economy operates on the global level, whereas our politics operates on the local level. Here the museums and big international exhibitions play a crucial political role by at least partially compensating the lack of the global public space and global politics. But the question remains: How can art circulating on the Internet be presented inside the museum or, more general, art exhibition space?
In the context of the Internet the artists function as content providers. It is quite a shift in the fate of art. In traditional art the content providers were Jesus Christ, the Holy Virgin, and the Christian Saints as well as gods of the ancient Greek pantheon and important historical figures. The goal of the artist was to give to these contents a shape, a form. The artist was a form-giver—not a content provider. Of course, the shift happened much earlier than the emergence of the Internet. But on the Internet the artwork is represented by need as a combination between images and texts. These combinations always take the character of documentary realism. When the artists use these combinations they function as freelance journalists. That means that they use the same means of production and distribution as mass media—but do so in a personalized, subjective way. So indeed, artists are not primarily form-givers here. They use forms that were created by other people and made accessible through the technology of the Internet, with all its formatting and protocols of use. Instead, these artists are content providers in a double sense: They document certain “objective” contents, but they do it in a somewhat “subjective” way—thus turning their own personality into a particular content. This content can be produced by the artists themselves—as actions, performances, and processes initiated by the artists and then documented by them.
The development of art during the last hundred years can indeed be described as a movement from the art object to the art event. This movement already started with Futurism and Dada. Accordingly, we can watch—also in our museums of contemporary art—the increasing presence of art documentation, instead of the traditional art works. The cumulative effect of these strategies has parallels with nineteenth-century realism as the artists combined the conventional means of documentation and representation with a certain personal touch.
Art becomes identical with the journalism, and both become individualized, personalized in their content even though both remain standardized in their form. The theoreticians of twentieth-century formalism—for example, Roman Jacobson—believed that the artistic use of the means of communication entails the suspension or even annulment of the information, of the content; in the art context the content becomes totally absorbed by the form. But in the context of the Internet the form remains identical for all the messages, and thus the content becomes immunized from its absorption by the form. On the technological level the Internet re-establishes the conventions of content presentation that dominated in the nineteenth century. Avant-garde artists protested against these conventions because they believed them to be purely arbitrary and merely culturally determined. But such a revolt against these conventions makes no sense with the Internet because they are inscribed into the Internet technology itself.
Obviously, this documentary art does not operate with traditional realist pictures but with combinations of pictures, photos, videos, sound sequences, and texts. All these components build a kind of meta-sentence, meta-narrative on the Internet. In the museum context they are presented as an installation. Conceptual artists already organized the installation space as a sentence that conveyed a certain meaning—analogous to the use of sentences in language. With conceptual art the artistic practice became meaningful and communicative again, following a certain period of the dominance of a formalist understanding of art. Art began to make theoretical statements, to communicate empirical experiences and theoretical knowledge, to formulate ethical and political attitudes, and to tell stories. We all know the substantial role that the famous “linguistic turn” played in the emergence and development of conceptual art. The influence of Wittgenstein and French Structuralism on conceptual art practice was decisive—to mention only some relevant names among many others.
But this new orientation toward meaning and communication does not mean that art became somehow immaterial, that its materiality lost its relevance, or that its medium dissolved into message. The contrary is the case. Every art is material—and can be only material. The possibility of using concepts, projects, ideas, and political messages in art was opened by the philosophers of the “linguistic turn” precisely because they asserted the material character of thinking itself. For these philosophers, thinking was understood as a use of language. And language was understood as being material through and through—as a combination of sounds and visual signs. Thus, the equivalence, or at least a parallelism, was demonstrated between word and image, between the order of words and the order of things, the grammar of language and the grammar of visual space.
This also explains the main difference between artistic or curatorial installations and traditional exhibitions. The traditional exhibition treats its space as an anonymous, neutral one. Only the exhibited artworks are important, not the space in which they are exhibited. On the other hand, the installation—be it an artistic or curatorial installation—inscribes the exhibited artworks into the contingent material space with a certain specific configuration. And here the real problem emerges of translating Internet art—all kinds of digital images, videos, texts, and their combinations—into the museum space. If the presentation of art on the Internet has become standardized, the presentation of art in the museum has become de-standardized. Today, the standard white cube is a thing of the past. And that means that the curator has to find a specific form, a specific installation, a specific configuration of the exhibition space for the presentation of the digital, informational material. Here the question of form becomes central once again. However, the form-giving shifts from the individual artworks to the organization of the space in which these artworks are presented. In other words, the responsibility for the form-giving becomes transferred from the artists to the curators who use the individual artworks as contents—this time as contents inside the space that the curators created. Of course, the artists can reclaim their traditional form-giving function, but only if they begin to act as curators of their own work. Indeed, when we visit an exhibition of contemporary art the only thing that truly remains in our memory is the organization of the spaces of this exhibition, especially if the organization is original, unusual.
So form-giving remains the main occupation for art in the museum. However, if the individual artworks can be reproduced, and the installation can be only documented, and when such documentation is put on the Internet, it becomes a content—and, thus, becomes open again for a form-giving operation inside the museum. So the exchange between museum and the Internet takes on a character of exchange between content and form: What was a form in the museum becomes a content on the Internet—and vice versa.
I would like to make a final remark concerning the role of the museum as an archive. Meanwhile we have acquired a habit to look to the Internet if we want to find some information, including historical information. Hence, the impression emerges that the Internet is a truly global archive. However, as I have already said, the Internet cannot be stabilized in time because it is privately driven. All data on the Internet perpetually emerge, disappear, or get modified. There is no fragment of the Internet that could be publicly owned—and therewith publicly protected as well. That means that the traditional archives, including the museums, still function as normative archives—also in our time. In the meantime these institutions increasingly have a presence in the Internet through the digitization of their archived materials. But it only confirms the fact that the capability of the Internet to become an archive depends on the offline institutions, including museums. Ultimately, that means the emergence of the Internet affected the functioning of museums less than is often assumed. The Internet gives museums additional possibilities to present their collections and activities, but in no way does it undermine the role that the museums have traditionally played in our culture.
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1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001[1790]), 90.