Displaying Research

In New York right now, Macuga brings us Sexuality of Atoms, an exhibition that features a vitrine of five or six pieces by Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý. Using home-made cameras, Tichý took thousands of clandestine images of women in his home town of Kyjov from the 1960s until the end of the 1980s. Macuga has curated a vitrine of Tichý’s photographs of women, placed alongside some of his kinky underwear designs. Eleven scrappy bits of paper and crude fantasy are laid out for our perusal. On the walls, Macuga has framed fresh prints from battered old Tichý negatives found strewn across the floor after he died in 2011; the negatives are clearly Tichý’s rejects, and so damaged that the resulting images almost disintegrate before your eyes. Pride of place, however, is the latest in Macuga’s ongoing series of huge black-and-white photo-realist tapestries. This one runs down the wall to extend several feet across the floor. It depicts Karl Marx’s tomb as the leafy setting for a celebratory picnic for a group of women (both clothed and naked), all taken from photos by Tichý. Multiple temporalities coincide in the image—especially during the opening, when a performer sat on the tapestry ‘grass’ wearing a flesh-coloured bodysuit onto which one of Tichý’s maverick underwear designs had been printed. Immediately, the most difficult aspects of Tichý’s practice (its objectification of women and his eroticized relationship to communist state surveillance) were put right out there as central issues. All of which leads me to think that the difference between an interesting and a humdrum archival installation depends not on the historical significance of the work being presented, but on the extent to which the artist manages to transform this material into something new and equally idiosyncratic. By making a massive digital photo-collage as the basis of a tapestry, Macuga turns the Tichý archive into a digested new format that is recognizably her own—albeit one where the source material is still visibly the product of others.

A handful of essays have connected Goshka Macuga’s work to that of Aby Warburg, especially after she raided the Warburg archives in London to find photographs of his 1896 expedition to visit the Hopi Indians. These photographs were presented alongside installation shots of Robert Morris’s exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1971 and private photographs from a Vietnam War veteran’s collection—all placed within a display system taken from Herbert Bayer’s design for the Edward Steichen show Road to Victory at MoMA in 1942. This list only scratches the surface of the resulting exhibition, I am Become Death, held at Kunsthalle Basel in 2009, which contained many more objects and references. Warburg has become a seductive point of reference for contemporary artists because he is seen as the ‘artistic’ art historian. 1 Earlier this year there was even an exhibition called Dear Aby Warburg, What Can Be Done With Images? (Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen). In the last decade of his life, he began arranging photographic reproductions of works of art (alongside a handful of contemporary images) onto large black fabric screens as a way to think visually through his arguments. The result, some have claimed, is an ‘art history without words’—a poetic phrase that glosses over how difficult it is to extrapolate anything like the clarity of an argument from his seventy nine Mnemosyne panels. It is especially hard when one doesn’t have prior knowledge of Warburg’s interests: the symbols and archetypes of human expression; the passion of Greek epics subsumed into courtly love narratives; the sublimation of pagan imagery into the Christian tradition. Benjamin, by contrast, is both a better known and more misunderstood precedent than Warburg—probably because his epic, unfinished Arcades Project is more verbal than visual. And yet it also anticipates a cut-and-paste culture: assembled entirely out of quotations, the Arcades Project juxtaposes texts, cartoons, prints, photographs, works of art, artifacts, and architecture in thematic constellations called ‘convolutes’. 2 The poet Kenny Goldsmith has been at work on a long-term project to rewrite the Arcades Project for twentieth-century New York. A description of the project, Capital, can be found here. Benjamin’s constellations, like the Mnemosyne Atlas, are quintessentially curatorial: they bring objects and events together in new ways, disrupting established taxonomies, disciplines, mediums, and proprieties. Of course, it’s important to note that Benjamin had a Marxist agenda that is barely detectable in the work of contemporary artists who select and arrange pre-existing images in constellations—from Luis Jacob to Cyprien Gaillard to Peter Piller to Jonathas de Andrade to Nate Lowman to to Wolfgang Tillmans to Henrik Olesen. Not all of these artists are retrospective; some, like Tillmans, do maintain a legible politics of the present day. My point is that the selection and arrangement of images today—be they archival originals or digitally pulled from the web—is so frequent a trope in contemporary art as to be inseparable from the information age and its accompanying ‘knowledge economy’. I would defend a place for visual research, but it’s a fine line between presenting research for a work (in all its disconneted, inchoate fragmentation) and a researched work (where the juxtapositions evidence more than simply effort). Works of art need to do more than be three-dimensional iterations of Pinterest and Tumblr.