Is there anybody who loves the arts who has not dreamed of breaking into a museum to be alone with the work of his or her choice? Have you never been convinced, when looking at a work of art, that you are the only person who has understood the real meaning of the work? Are there any experts on aesthetic secrets who have not felt the temptation to ban other eyes from seeing the work?
The art business is a system of jealousies in which desire for the works results in them becoming objects of desire. If a work has attracted desire, its rivals appear beside it and want the longing bestowed on the other object for themselves. Every object glitters with the yearning for the yearning of the others. The market inspires sensuality, the hunger for desire makes things beautiful and the compulsive need for attention creates interesting things. This system functions as long as there is a taboo on the idea of the moment of fulfilment. Although the works appeal to our desire, they are prohibited from surrendering to the person who acquires them. Their value lies in the fact that they refuse their owners and wait for further offers.
The bourgeois development of greed has been in progress for two hundred years. Having offered the big bourgeoisie a new kind of sensuality, it is presently doing the same for the middle classes. By now the magnetism of value excites a perceptible section of the public. People who want to be somebody open an emotional account for art in their inner self. It does not matter whether there is little activity on the account. The important thing is that many eyes are watching the market from that moment on. The observer’s ego becomes a depot for values and meanings. Only an account-shaped self is fit to be paid into with art in the form of value. If I did not already have the first-person form of a possible owner of works and values, the works would have no value appeal for me. I have an account, I am an account, I put my credit on my own account. A work will only be important to me if I can book it to my own account.
This is the current state of value fetishism. Did art have this meaning from the beginning? Was it never an extravagant outpouring of forces that were too free to be possessed? What did Kandinsky mean when he wrote: ‘In every painting a whole is mysteriously enclosed, a whole life of tortures, doubts, of hours of enthusiasm and inspiration’?1 Were there never transfers to accounts by people who dreamed that their payment would give them another ‘whole life’? Meanwhile the art world has been overdrawn by private accounts. Can art withdraw itself from them?
Before the onset of modernity the entire stock of things in the world that could be described as the work of human beings was very small. Things produced by human beings were almost negligible compared with things that existed naturally. Moreover, works of art in the real sense of the word made up a very tiny share of produced and self-made things. Wherever the major forces of life are the natural and traditional forces, human beings have to see themselves mainly as receivers of being and as guardians of ancient holy orders. The most powerful early testimonies of the might of works of high culture, sacred buildings, were technical responses to the ideas of holiness and majesty. They marked the beginning of artistic processing of the numinous, the spiritual element.
Human self-perception became active from the time that the modern system of self-empowered production was set in motion. Subjectivity increasingly occupied the position of the originator of being and of that which exists. It developed the creator position for itself; it discovered that the world’s system of order was not really something that had to be preserved and repeated from the very beginning, but much more something to outdo and to produce on the basis of future designs. From then on we could say that the world not only had to be interpreted differently but also had to be decisively changed. It was no longer a fixed stock of things reproduced according to its own laws – it was a construction site transformed according to human plans.
The genius and the engineer became the chief models for an unprecedented enthusiasm generated by human beings themselves. The two types were like guarantors of human creative power. If people achieved this self-confidence, it could spark off the modern urge to outbid each other. This explains the anthropological and ontological mission of the modern work of art: the finished work evokes human creative power as such, while its artistic level proclaims that production has surpassed nature. This is the dual meaning of the perfection of art. For this reason the visible appearance of skill, of craftsmanship, has always been one of the main themes of art in the modern age. It is in the work that human virtù becomes virtuosity; it is a virtue for humans to use their power to create things. This means that craftsmanship worthy of the name is not concerned with showing off artistically. What is important is the newly formed subjectivity that is able to learn what can be learned until it takes the risk and plunges into achievements that cannot be learned. This is why art reveals humanized spirituality: creative artists put things into the work that go beyond what can be positively learned. In doing so, artists share in a twofold creative power corresponding to the dual nature of artistic skill. As masters of their subject, they know how to repeat; as geniuses, they step into uncharted regions. Mastery without genius is great expertise; genius without trained excellence is intense and regenerating. The two together can inspire human lives that are the goal of humanistic worship. In both aspects artistic skill has innate epiphanic qualities that give human beings themselves awareness of essential human powers. In art the human being can appear to the human being. The work of art that praises the master preaches its author’s creative power and affirms the possibility of authorship as such. The magic of the effects gives an idea of the level of the cause. Where worlds beside the world are created in the works, it makes their creators look like gods beside God.
The epiphanic tendency of modern creative power demands that production and exhibition are interconnected. The creative force cannot reveal itself without unveiling the work in a presentation space. The visualization of the skill of production presupposes the production of visibility. It acts as the central agency for epiphanic productivity. It shows what artistic bourgeois subjectivity has to show: to present itself in its objectified power, to present worlds in the visual work. This implies the power to attack and rework the world itself modelled on the world picture.
When the work is publicly shown, the bourgeois public arena helps to conceal this revelation. The epiphanic meaning of the revelation of creative powers is discreetly shrouded by the exhibition’s significance for publicity and commerce. Exhibiting gives the revelation a popular format. Human creative powers are revealed as understatements in which nothing is recognizable except what is visible to the naked eye in the pictures. This guarantees that nobody is able to see anything more than he or she can understand. Profane persons are not forced to scorch their eyes looking at the apocalypse of inherent human powers in the exhibition salon.
Why are we witnessing an inflation of things that can be exhibited at the end of the twentieth century?2 First, because there is a parallel inflation of things that can be produced. The monstrous increase in all means of production has led to a huge increase in all kinds of production power. Larger and larger segments of reality are being transformed into raw materials for productions – into basic materials for illustrations, relationships and transformations. Everything that was once a product can revert back to raw material to store the effects of work as suffering material once again.
Whether goods are mobile or immobile, in the modernization process it is possible in principle to exhibit everything that played a role in the secular processes to improve producible things. Display nowadays not only includes the immediate products of creative power but also involves the raw materials, accessories, prototypes, interim stages and waste. In Marxist terms one not only brings the products to be exhibited but also the means of production and ultimately the relations of production, too. Even landscapes and living spaces have been declared exhibits. The entire social structure is straining to get into the museum. This is not completely incomprehensible: if we still had the paintbrush with which Raphael had painted The School of Athens, we cannot possibly imagine what would stop museum directors from exhibiting the paintbrush next to the painting. What is more, if the mortal remains of Raphael’s clients had been superbly preserved as mummies and still existed, who could guarantee that we would not be able to admire them in a side room of the museum today? Anything connected with the modern miracle of production of a work can be included in the appropriate revelatory form in the exhibition.
We can see a more fundamental cause of the present inflation of things for exhibition in the dynamic of the modern arts themselves. If modern exhibiting as such represents a voluntary declaration of creative power, during the twentieth century the boundaries of what it is possible to exhibit have been exploded by a twofold revolution of the arts: by the radical self-liberation of expression and construction, on the one hand, and by the inexorable extension of the concept of art, on the other. These two explosive processes with their didactic conservatism and art-political expansionism have combined into a common effect: a tendency towards increasing arbitrariness that has run right through the twentieth century. The contemporary culture of exhibitions and trade fairs can only be understood as an organizational system within art for processing aesthetic arbitrariness as it approaches its maximum value. Its accomplishment is to process the fluctuations of modern art hermeneutically, both in terms of museum studies and commercially, so that increasing arbitrariness can coexist with the self-celebration of creative power. All the traditional parameters of creative work can be revolutionized; what remains stable is the convertibility of the work form and the value form. Young investors on the art exchanges do not need to be told more about the spiritual element in art. They have summed up modernization for themselves: the equivalence of the form of the work and the form of value has clearly been deduced. The gold that represents the pure possibility of bearing value glitters invisibly in the innermost core of the works. If we can describe a work of visual art as incarnating a spark of creative power, this immediately forms a value crystal that makes it suitable for acquisition. Works of art are exhibited as aesthetic shares.
The extension of the concept of art reflects the expansion of the value-creating artist’s subjectivity. In the end everything that the artist’s life touched must be transformed into art. King Midas is everywhere. If it were legally feasible, Andy Warhol would simply have taken entire streets in New York he had turned into art works by walking through them and would have sold them off to collectors with fat wallets.
The art exhibition of the modern age is the right contemporary institution for extinct and active creative works. It organizes retrospectives and samples current productions. The works shown under the spotlight are essentially tied to their manner of display. Their form of value does not make them naturally fit for hoarding as hidden treasures. Aside from being out of place in art-political terms, they would be unhappy in a feudal treasure chamber as regards their spiritual value because the meaning of the work would not be understood. This meaning characteristically tends towards the public and towards open display, whether in the form of market, museum or history of art.
In the nineteenth- or twentieth-century sense, the internal gesture of a work of visual art anticipates its exhibition. The work is already demanding the white wall from which it tries to catch the eye of specific people. It is already clamouring to interrupt the emptiness of the exhibition room. It is already pointing towards the catalogue that secures its visibility in absentia. It bangs its head against the wall of indifference that thinks it has already seen everything. It flirts with experts who have their comparisons at the ready. It is already begging for a place in memory and an empty page in art history where the epic of creativity will be updated to the latest version.
The closer we come to the present day, the greater will be the number of works whose gesture and substance wholly fit these descriptions. Museums, trade fairs and galleries are actually the right institutions today for producing aesthetic visibility, and the production of art itself will irresistibly fall in line with the styles of museums, galleries and the colonization of Cologne by art. Gallery art flows to wherever there is an art gallery.
The result is that the modern art of art exhibitions becomes firmly entrenched in its tautological development: the production of art revolves around exhibiting art that revolves around producing exhibitions. The modern art mediation machinery has been installed as a display machine that has long since become more powerful than the individual works exhibited. The exhibition production process with its commercial core and its publicity wings has become autonomous. It races across its mass of exhibits on its own steam, and ultimately it no longer shows any creative power except its own. Exhibiting as such has stopped being a kind of art because it can do what it wants, and since then art has been in conflict with the process of making it visible.
There have been historical moments in which the white museum walls represented an important step forward into free space. The walls were like a stage for the public presentation of the self-revelation of human creative power in the bourgeois age. The manifest creative power spoke down from the walls to essential forces that were as yet unawakened. If admiration did not stun these forces into apathy, they realized the heights they could be capable of reaching. The creative powers that emerged could hope to continue in the form of inflammatory forces. Force wants to be understood by force, which means it wants its impact to be preserved. We can say that the force of opening up generated by what the work showed first created the exhibition space of the modern art museum. Otherwise it would have remained as a feudal or semi-feudal treasure cave. In fact, the present Safe Art movement is a continuation of this. Only the acting element of the artwork itself can emanate the force to open up the room in which it emerges into visibility. The epiphany of the power to create enables the museum and gallery – and not the other way around, the gallery and museum – to put art on display. Yet nowadays the creative powers themselves have invested in the machinery of directing visibility. The self-exhibition of trade fairs, museums and galleries has pre-empted the self-revelation of the works; it has forced the works to adopt the mode of being of self-advertising. Since then, works have to generate their own applause. Aletheia has its furthest outposts in advertisements. The self-advertising of works means that the last truths have passed on: ephemerality is revelation until cancellation. The painting flashes briefly in the present; there is a possible afterglow of its value on bank accounts. The only thing we can be sure of is that nowadays no painting can be as meaningful as the re-usable hook on which it temporarily hangs.
The source of the continuing cult of the arts lies in the human and religious hope that modern people have in their power of creativity. This includes the confidence that people can induce themselves to produce the conditions of their happiness on their own. In doing so, humans demonstrate that they are able to create preconditions for happiness and eliminate reasons for unhappiness. They are also lucky to be able to express their misfortune. This threefold ability seems like unmitigated benevolence; anyone who has a share in it is a partner in the human alliance against the forces of misfortune.
What can the art of art fairs add to this? It is condemned to cut the link at a deep level between creative potency and the promise of happiness. In fact, a work in an exhibition of works knows no greater happiness than to make the leap into the big exhibition. Human creative power has an immense capacity for happiness, and under the law of equivalence of the form of work and the form of value, we can distinguish a personal share of this capacity for happiness – it is, in fact, the part of the power of production that brings the work into circulation. The happiness it is seeking is that of being exhibited, traded and intensively interpreted. It tends to be forgetful when it comes to remembering the source of legitimacy of all the exhibition and production. The right to art derives solely from human forces calling to create their own happiness. Happiness calls itself up; by evoking itself it strengthens itself, and it uses this strength to make itself happy. In the end, the radiation of modern expertise depends upon the magnetism of happiness. Mastery of happiness is attractive because, with its help, the ability to live goes beyond being compelled to live. This is how playing enters into life and makes it more than just a burden. Art is the anti-serious tendency: it crosses the threshold from ‘you must’ to ‘you can’. This lends art the seriousness of great relief.
Important works of art are places that open up at the self-revelation of happy creative powers. Because such powers are expended as an act of celebration and flow out of gratitude for themselves, each work of this kind streams into the universal fund of happiness. These works are equally far removed from unhappy expertise and from speechless misery. The modern work of art attests that human contributions to happiness are possible. Moreover, they are open to the chance that human beings can be their own contribution when they are free to be experts but also free of being possessed by their expertise.
Collections, galleries and museums should be judged by the promise they keep themselves. On that criterion, museums have no happiness and happiness has no museum. In other words, art that knows something better deserts the gallery. Where does it find something better?
In 1989 it is time to say clearly that we are living once again in the middle of a Belle Époque, an age of stationary assaults and galloping inflation. On all fronts, mobilization is accompanied by simultaneous delays. The territories where the forces are deployed have been given a name that troubles the good conscience of the powers of creation: environment. Anyone who says ‘environment’ makes a face as if he or she has a disabled child from now on. The producers gather together like a parents’ meeting. But by now we have had some time to look back.
What happened ten or twenty years ago in artistic life seems to be buried in the depths of history today. Beuys and Giorgione meet up on the edge of the Milky Way and smile at each other – they are contemporaries now. They belong to the small group of the dead who know what it costs to try to seduce human beings into living. That place down there, that small blue disc, the discus thrown thoughtfully into the universe – it is inhabited by creatures that dare not understand their situation. For their benefit somebody put signs of life into circulation, traces of felt, of body heat, of forces of attraction, the little fat rolls of the well-padded sleeping goddess, music and bare skin under pleasant trees.
Every human being is a human being. What kind of magnanimous charlatanry could claim that? Every human being is an artist? How long is it since that could be said without guile by cultural consultants? Nowadays people are not really happy about seeing themselves in very high definitions. There are historic times when they must think of themselves at a higher level because great things happen to them, and other times when they belittle themselves because they are challenged by enormous things. The present Belle Époque is an interim period between the small and the large gestures. The energy tends to flow towards the involuntary great person who looks voluntarily for a reduction in size, while everything that tries to make itself bigger involuntarily seems small.
The reason for this delay, this sitting on the fence, this inability to decide, has a radical aspect. A schism has opened up in the interior of the creative forces themselves and is continually deepening. Art no longer sees virtuosity as its absolute precondition. Genius no longer sees the engineer as a necessary partner in every enterprise. The artistic forces no longer see technical mastery of methods as their natural ally. The capacity for happiness has distanced itself from the aesthetic potentialities on display. This schism definitely dates back some time: it reflects complicated changes in the alliances of the bourgeois energies that reshape the world. Even the happiness campaigns of modern times have had their deserters, their wounded, their war victors and double agents.
Exhibiting also changes its meaning in this reshaping of alliances. Nowadays, it seems, one can only show second-best things. The displaying of works can scarcely be the moment of epiphany in which expressive and proprietorial forces of happiness are communicated to an audience. The exhibition has long since disintegrated into different things: the presentation of the fetish, the value offering or the exhibition of an accompanying philosophy.
What does art that knows better do? Where should it go to gather itself for something worthy of revelation, something that shines into the exhibits from happiness we cannot buy? How can works admit that they are only epicentres of something better?
Art is folding into itself. This is not the same as retreating into one’s own home, into a cave of wordless hollowness, but art is shrinking its front to the world, shrinking its contact area to the rest of business. It is stepping back from the exhibition front. It rethinks whether it was always well advised to pitch into the very front line of visibility. It considers its alliance with the publicity machines of museums, galleries and publications. It allows the question as to whether proof of happiness and being at the front can mean the same thing. In all this it indicates how it shares the historical self-doubt of the creative powers. By folding in on itself it becomes complicit in the crisis of things made by human beings. What should it mean to present works on the exhibition front now, when it is actually the time for production to question itself? How should one simulate the happiness of competent craftsmanship when it has long been clear that the freedom to do creative work has been trampled down by the compulsion to put energies into the work and exploit values?
Ten years ago people were already saying that art was deserting the gallery and going to the country, going to people. This was supposed to suggest that it was looking for free space and wanted to find a different scope for happiness, to interrupt unhappiness. The happier forces are calling to themselves for accomplices, not for owners. Even the form of the work and the form of value are made available so that the voice of art can become a pure overhead trajectory again, an arrow of happiness we can experience at the moment when life goes faster than its exploitation.
People are saying that art is becoming sidelined nowadays, that art is folding into itself. It is being sidelined by folding inwards. It is folding into itself by being sidelined. It is only showing a little bit now. It has more than can be shown. It can still show that it contains something more that is not showing. A new ecology of showing requires a different regulation for exhibitions.
It is no longer the work in its parading mode that comes into view now. Almost nothing about the work offers a target to the viewer. The work remains folded up, rolled inwards, tacked to itself as if it were closed. The day of its exhibition and unfolding is not today, perhaps not again, perhaps not yet. All the same it has a kind of existence, if not in the usual sense. The present moment of the work is neither the present of its value nor what it contains visually. It cannot be seen fully as it is; it remains in the sharp angle of the world; curious eyes cannot read through it and consume it; the covers stop the viewer from seeing inside: in some cases the folds are so thick that we cannot even find out whether there are really works in the containers. We hover involuntarily between two hypotheses: there is something inside, or there is nothing inside.
Yet the descriptions leave us in no doubt that what is standing there folded up must be connected with important works. The artists have invested heavily in the objects and their spending is also quantitatively high. A residue of lived time, ideas and existential tensions has built up inside the objects. Where is the white wall on which the totality of inward-folded surfaces could be spread out again? Would it not be good if such a wall existed? Or have the works themselves rejected this wall? Have they become resigned to the fact they are undiscoverable? Are they angry with the white wall? Do they feel a lack of acceptance? Do they want to stop casting pearls before collectors? Or are they the operational mass in a new exhibition trick?
The works show no traces of their experiences with walls and galleries. Their previous history hardly counts at the moment. There is something abrupt and casual about the way they stand around. Now they are lying collapsed in on themselves: they are not pleading; they are not sulking; they take no action against themselves; they protect themselves. They demand some space on the margins without boasting of their existence. They stand at the side, as humble as shelves in cellars; placed there, not exhibited; assembled, not highlighted. What they say would have remained completely speechless if it were not for Anselm Kiefer’s rabbit fur exhibit in his Dachbodenbild. This work offers a text like a meta-painting that can be read as a reflection on the old art exhibition space and about how other forces broke into it. The breakout from it is shown by Gilbert & George’s large-scale drawings, the ‘paper sculptures’.
The train of thought behind these assembled objects is connected, probably for the first time, not to the works but to their exhibition. The key is in renouncing explanation, dissemination, hot air and mass effort. The works themselves reveal a sharp turn away from focusing on exhibitions; it seems the works can do things differently. They do not produce themselves although they are produced. Art moves aside, refusing to engage in molesting passers-by. This lesson in discretion makes most art exhibitions look like bodybuilding competitions.
Is it possible for artists to resign from art without presenting their departure as a work of art? First of all – why should they leave art? When happiness can no longer be found in art but rather beside it, before it and after it, the time has come to resign from the forms of the work, of value and of the white cube.
Joseph Beuys’s resignation statement was a continuation of his avant-garde dream of transforming art into life. He was claiming for himself personally and for his times that something existed that was more generalized and more intense than artistic art. Perhaps one has to fail as an artist to move on as an assistant of happiness. Perhaps the very creative powers themselves must lie fallow like a field that has been too severely exploited for too long. Removing the creative happiness from works of art consigns art to the sidelines.
Are these works sad that their impact is not stronger? Do they find their intimate existence as a cheque unsatisfying? Are they pretending to great exhibitions that they have a capacity for exile that, in fact, they secretly deplore? Do they feel contradicted by time like the naïve things of yesterday? Such questions are probably too invasive. They disturb a peaceful, marginal situation that the works of art have just discovered. To be able to rest on oneself – that is certainly something new for the presentation pieces of aesthetic creative power. It is an unusual experience for 999 works accustomed to pleading their own cause to the world not to demand that passers-by come to a halt in front of them. Lying idle and waiting – this is an unexpected adventure for art objects accustomed to exploitation. Folding up inside themselves and not entering the annals of art history in top form – this is the feat that art works thirsting for meaning were least well prepared for. Or are they actually prepared for more than could have been imagined at the moment of their creation?
Art is lying idle. People will simply walk past and a slight breeze of distracted attention will waft through the pieces of work. Without this the same people would pass by anyway, but the works would call out after them, begging and tempting like a bargain that offers us the alternative of grabbing it or missing it. Are these works calling? Are they luring us? And if they have already left the gallery – whom are they approaching? Who is coming up to them? Are they close to us when we walk past them? Will our walk past be different if they are standing on the sidelines?
Walk past? How does one walk past so much casual stuff? Does one pass by without memories being evoked of something nameless, something to come, something wonderful that will later be given the vapid name ‘art’? From the moment we have glanced at the surface of the objects they have to be regarded as seen.
This is not the time for big promises. We will soon get out of this exhibition hall as well. No faraway place speaks as if it were drunk on great future happiness. But seen is seen. What is visibility? Perhaps the everyday life of revelation. So what is revelation? That something that shines at you with its visibility. How does it happen? When I am in the open. In the open? When I am so far outside that the world shows itself.