The Order of Things

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Great news! We’ve been asked to organise a few filmprograms and/or events for Muhka (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Antwerp. Dieter Roelstraete curated an interesting exhibition, entitled ‘the Order of Things’, on the ‘uses’ of image archives – which is right up our alley – and asked us to elaborate on that subject and select some cinematographic works (films as a kind of control, ordering images in time) that will be shown parallel to the expo. The pivotal figure within that selection will be Arthur Lipsett: his films will be shown on September 12th, presented by Brett Kashmere, who has been touring with the first European retrospective of Lipsett’s concise but influential career. We’ll keep you posted…

THE ORDER OF THINGS
MuHKA, Antwerp: 11 September > 23 November 2008

In the fall of 2008, the Antwerp museum of contemporary art MuHKA will host an exhibition on the ‘uses’ of archival images, image archives and image banks – and various other manifestations of a classificatory, “encyclopaedic” impulse – in contemporary art, titled “The Order of Things”.
This exhibition takes as its point of departure a web-based project by Vancouver photo-artist Roy Arden titled “The World as Will and Representation”, an online image archive consisting of a staggering 30,000+ jpegs from which Arden (who helped to flesh out many of the germinal ideas for this exhibition) culls the visual motifs for his recent ‘archival’ collage works.
In “The Order of Things”, this image archive’s use of a stringent classificatory logic – alphabetical and thus eminently logical, yet also often bizarre in its (inevitably arbitrary) ordering of one ‘class’ of images after another – operates as a curatorial trigger for a sustained reflection upon the various uses of archives, databases, encyclopaedias, typologies and other “ordering devices” (the title being an allusion to a well-known book by the historian of dis/order, Michel Foucault) as methods and strategies for confronting the delirious spectacle of the contemporary image world. This delirium is of course nowhere more palpably ‘present’ than in the phenomenal proliferation of (photographic) imagery that is the internet, which, as a conceptual horizon, figures as one of the exhibition’s defining parameters – hence the centrality accorded to Arden’s own “The World as Will and Representation” in the exhibition, and hence also the inclusion, for instance, of Thomas Ruff’s “JPEG” photographs. In some sense, “The Order of Things” talks ‘about’ – insofar as exhibitions can be about something – the world as a universe entirely made up out of images/pictures (mainly of a ‘vernacular’ photographic nature) and only made accessible to us through images/pictures; a world that may seem impossibly chaotic, and therefore invites all kinds of ‘ordering’ interventions that seek to domesticate and contain the natural excesses of the image-world. This partly ironic, self-conscious “will to order” – a classificatory impulse that is supremely aware of its own futility, and of the fatal contingency of its classificatory criteria – is the precise juncture where the archival and/or encyclopaedic impulse in contemporary art enters into the picture: the “art of classification” that is implied in the archive, the atlas and the encyclopaedia (or its corollaries, the data-base and image-bank) is an integral self-reflexive part of what Martin Heidegger has called “the fundamental event of the modern age” – the “conquest of the world as picture.”

Visual abandon/abundance and the excessive aesthetics of plenty, as formal qualities of the world encountered in this chaotic, delirious avalanche of images, are at the heart of this exhibition. They are features of our contemporary ‘digitized’ condition that inevitably invite critical scrutiny (much of which takes the shape of art – an art that will seek to impose order, or otherwise reveal the hidden order of things), yet at the same time also act as sources of authentic wonder to which art may respond by duplicating this spectacle of visual overload, by adding to it even. This deep, irresolvable ambiguity – a seamless reflection of the ambivalence of the image proper – is a defining characteristic of the exhibition, and of much of the work included in it, and of course serves to remind us of the irony implied in all uses of the term ‘order’. [The exhibition could just as well have been called “The Disorder of Things”.] This irony is also present in the awareness that, no matter how sincere and profound contemporary art’s indignant criticism of the society of spectacle may seem (and effectively be), art also irrefutably belongs to this very regime of spectacularization.
Two ‘types’ of profusion, then, are at work in this exhibition. One pertains to the brute fact of the visual abundance characteristic of contemporary society proper – the realization of the world’s overwhelming visual riches, and the mirror effect it creates in any art that seeks to respond to this relative wealth by replicating it. Here we find the rationale for the exhibition’s own character of visual overload – the sheer quantity of work on display that consists, precisely, of picturing (or imaging/imagining) quantity. Secondly, there is also the fact of the fundamental heterogeneity of the visual abundance that characterizes the image-world – hence also the heterogeneity of artistic responses to this fact: not only is it an art of visual plenty, it is also one of irreducible differences and differentiations. To grasp the baffling variety of artistic attitudes, methods and practices that are at play in this labyrinthine exhibition – a reflection in itself of the labyrinthine nature of the world as such, and one that must by its very definition remain incomplete – we have isolated a number of organizational principles that symbolize or reflect these varying attitudes, methods and practices. They are the following:

Appropriation: under this well-known rubric we have aimed to contextualize art’s critical eye upon the image world, i.e. upon the world as wholly mediated (and, what’s more, only made accessible to us) by images. The work of Sigmar Polke and Richard Prince is key here, as are the historical references represented by Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, whose collages effectively presaged ‘classical’ appropriation art. Thomas Ruff’s so-called “JPG” pictures could also be considered in this tradition, with the excessive realm of Internet imagery (an updated version of the 20th century ‘genre’ of vernacular photography) operating as the virtual horizon of the visible world. The work of Sarah Charlesworth, Sanja Ivekovic, Cady Noland and Peter Piller likewise belongs to this expansive (and necessarily porous) category of critical containment.

Archives: here we encounter the encyclopaedic impulse in all its unfettered glory, no longer (or not necessarily) inhibited by critical considerations or attempts at containing or disciplining the image world, but ready, instead, to accommodate the image realm as one that literally cries out for ordering and classification, thereby enhancing its luscious wealth. Hans Peter Feldmann is the genre’s undisputed reigning champion, and his influence can be felt in the work of many younger artists in this exhibition, from Luis Jacob to Peter Piller and beyond (Marjolijn Dijkman, Steven Shearer, Batia Suter). The vast image banks that come out of this archival tradition often (but not always, as Feldmann’s own work attests, and as Fischli & Weiss’ Sichtbare Welt or Gerhard Richter’s Atlas ‘proves’) consist of appropriated images; quite often, they serve to eulogize rather than criticize the marvel of visibility.

Collage & bricolage: a more ‘innocent’ form of appropriation perhaps, collage-as-bricolage is an age-old (hence often called ‘primitive’) attempt at making sense of the world by ordering its seemingly disparate elements into new maps, narratives and world-views – hence the traditional equation of bricolage with the magical thought of primitive art. Juxtaposition, the primary formal logic of collage, is also an important classificatory tool in the pre-modern world-views that are the subject of Michel Foucault’s “Order of Things” after which the exhibition is named. It is also in the sphere of collage – as montage – that the traditional primacy of photography in the archival field can be challenged: along with the likes of Bruce Conner and Joseph Cornell, Arthur Lipsett is one of the pioneering practitioners of the art of the film collage.

Typologies: here we encounter the classifying (‘encyclopaedic’) impulse as the regulatory driving force behind the artist’s own image production; the classic examples are August Sander, Walker Evans, Ed Ruscha, Bernd & Hilla Becher and Hans Eijkelboom. Figurations of the grid (Eijkelboom) or the index (Tine Melzer) are frequently central to this trope, as is the parodic tone of scientific, pseudo-anthropological thoroughness (Douglas Huebler and ‘classical’ photo-based conceptual art in general) and a quasi-pathological compulsion to order and repeat (On Kawara, Mark Manders). The classificatory decisions made by the artist can be entirely ‘objective’, that is, forced upon her or himself by the nature of the object in question (e.g. the Bechers, Christopher Williams), or subjective instead – the consequence of an entirely arbitrary decision, potentially resulting in bizarre taxonomies that cannot be anything other than ‘art’ (Eijkelboom, Piller). Finally, as quickly became apparent in Sander’s and Evans’ projects, this approach, regularly used to enforce pseudo-anthropologist humanist agendas (“People of the Twentieth Century”, “Many Are Called”), is often loaded with a mournful, melancholy quality that is wholly specific to the photographic medium – the hallmark of Christian Boltanski’s work in this field.

As is clear from these enumerations and taxonomies, photography will be the dominant medium in the exhibition; it is the technical innovation of photography and of the ideally limitless reproducibility of its images, theorized to such epochal effect by Walter Benjamin, that has transformed our experience of the world into an overwhelmingly visual (‘retinal’) one. Furthermore, photography has also contributed decisively to the “democracy” of imagery that is implied in the exhibition’s conceptual make-up: as a project, “The Order of Things” would be entirely unthinkable without the democratization of image production that was ushered in by the popularization of photography, beginning with the introduction of cheap cameras and film at the beginning of the twentieth century, all the way up to the advent of digital photography and the Internet as everyman’s image bank.
That said, however, “The Order of Things” is not a medium-specific or medially defined exhibition, in that it is not an exhibition about photography or solely consisting of photography. Some of the most important work done in the field covered within the exhibition’s conceptual framework has taken the shape of books (of photographs, it is true) rather than photographs, and the artist’s book will therefore take pride of place within the exhibition concentric layout – as will “the internet”, in the shape and form of Roy Arden’s “The World as Will and Representation”, which will be on view on computer screens installed throughout the exhibition, as so many images-in-motion.

Participating artists/artworks by:
Roy Arden (CAN), Sarah Charlesworth (US), Marjolijn Dijkman (NL), Hans Eijkelboom (NL), Douglas Huebler (US), Sanja Ivekovic (CRO), Luis Jacob (CAN), Cameron Jamie (US), Arthur Lipsett (CAN), Mark Manders & Roger Willems (NL), Tine Melzer (D), Marc Nagtzaam (NL), Cady Noland (US), Peter Piller (D), Sigmar Polke (D), Richard Prince (US), Robert Rauschenberg (US), Julian Rosefeldt (D), Thomas Ruff (D), Joachim Schmid (D), Steven Shearer (CAN, tbc), Nancy Spero (US), Batia Suter (CH), Els Van den Meersch (B), Andy Warhol (US, tbc) & Christopher Williams (US)