How to Do Things with Art. Dorothea von Hantelmann

      Wily Stratagems Hans Ulrich Obrist

      How to Do Things with Art is a call to the production of reality and the political and societal significance of art.

      In an essay on Jeff Koons, Dorothea von Hantelmann recently pointed out her interest in individ­uals who place themselves “outside of the ‘cultural limit’ of criticism,” those who are “off limits, outside of what dominates a contemporary discourse and its predominant order of thought, perception, speech and understanding.” This necessity informs How to Do Things with Art; an exploration of the work of four artists, James Coleman, Daniel Buren, Tino Sehgal and Jeff Koons, who operate precisely at the histor­ical limits of what might be called the “paradigm of criticality” and at the threshold of something else, something other.

      Von Hantelmann is attentive to artists who—to quote one of the passages from Merleau-Ponty that so inspired Zaugg’s Die List der Unschuld—“act … as if we still had everything to learn.”

       Like Rémy Zaugg’s attempt to return to a pre-objective mode of cognition and experience in his meditation on a sculpture by Donald Judd, she examines Daniel Buren’s early pivotal contributions to the tradition of institutional critique, countering accusations of his more recent work as being too decorative, and instead finding in this work ways to move beyond the conventionalized conception of the exhibition: flights of innovation and invention.

      Innovation is about new practices and new ways of doing things, embodied by Oulipo—a group that functions like a permanent research laboratory for literary innovation. Drawing on what Harry Matthews, one of the protagonists of Oulipo, calls “absolutely unimaginable incidents of fiction” the writers of Oulipo, inspired by French poet and novelist Raymond Roussel’s playful language games in How I Wrote Certain of My Books, continuously invent new rules to write using arithmetical ideas. François Le Lionnais, another Oulipo protagonist, emphasizes the importance of the term potentiality, which he prefers to experimental, because it implies the attempt to find something which may not yet have been done but which nevertheless could be.

      A key to understanding von Hantelmann’s unique approach to contemporary art is the fact that at the end of the 1990s she worked closely with the groundbreaking choreographers Jérôme Bel and Xavier Le Roy. Their focus on what actually takes place has shaped her belief that art has a power and a responsibility, which is manifest throughout How to Do Things with Art as she describes how James Coleman, Daniel Buren, Tino Sehgal and Jeff Koons are con­cerned with what art does and less with what it says. As the title of the book implies—a play on J. L. Austin’s lecture series How to Do Things with Words, in which Austin redefined the performative, or reality-producing, capacity of language—these artists attempt to reach the limits of artistic practice and to suggest alterations, novelties, changes, introductions, departures and variations from the canonical 19th-century exhibition format.

       As Richard Hamilton once told me, “we only remem­ber exhibitions which invent a new display feature.” To change the rules of the game today is to change the exhibition format. And von Hantelmann demonstrates that each of these artists, in their own way, invent what Roussel might have called “wily stratagems”—performative gambits to turn the production of exhibitions into the production of reality.

       The Societal Efficacy of Art

      At the heart of How to Do Things with Art lies the question of art’s relevance to society. How does art become politically or socially sig­nif­icant and what preconditions must be fulfilled in order to enable art­works to attain such significance? This book attempts to answer these questions on a theoretical level, and to indicate, via a number of contemporary artworks, how artists can create and shape social rele­vance. In other words, it attempts to provide what could be called a pragmatic understanding of art’s societal impact.

The question of how to do things with art seems particularly pertinent today both from a societal and an artistic perspective. Never before has what we call art been so important to Western societies: more art museums are being built than ever before, art exhibitions attract a mass audience, the art world has not only expand­ed globally but also so­cially—up to the point where a London journalist calls art “the social lubricant of our great city”¹—and probably no other profession has received such a dramatic boost in status as the artist, who perfectly embodies today’s prevailing idea of a creative, self-determined subjectivity. Even though from this empirical perspective it is evident that art has a sub­stantial impact, it is much less clear how this impact actually functions.

       Above and beyond the artwork, I argue that it is the format of the exhibition that is the key factor in art’s rele­vance to society. In this respect, the popularity of exhi­bi­tions today is not an entirely new phenomenon. It is a continuation of a success story that began 200 years ago: the increasing dominance of a fairly new ritual—the exhi­bition—that is specific to Western democratic market societies and that ritually establishes and enacts an important set of values and parameters that were and still are fundamental to Western societies: the instantiation of a linear notion of time; the increased valorization of the individual; the exceptional importance attributed to the production of material objects, and their subsequent circulation through commerce.

The exhibition in its canonical 19th-century formation—and the museum itself—provides a reinforcement mechanism in relation to new institutions of social training governed by what Michel Foucault called evolutive time. ² By collecting artifacts from the past, the museum gives shape and presence to history, inventing it, in effect, by defining the space for a ritual encounter with the past. It marks time into a series of stages that comprises a linear path of evolution; it organizes these stages into an itinerary that the visitor’s route retraces; and it projects the future as a course of limitless development. It is in all these ways that the format of the exhibition echoes and resonates with other new institutions of discipline and training through which—via the construction of a series of stages to be passed through by means of the successful acquisition of appropriate skills—individuals are encouraged to regard themselves as beings in constant need of progressive development.

       And yet, even more important in terms of the present societal significance of the exhibition is its ability to create and cultivate a specific nexus between the individual and the material object. The notion of the individual is central to the exhibition and cultivated by it on two levels. First, by displaying works that are informed by and therefore to an extent also mirror the subjectivity of the individual—the artist—and second, because the museum constitutes the first public ritual that explicitly addresses and singles out the individual (as the experience of the visual artwork is conceived as being a one-on-one experience, unlike e.g. theater, which addresses the individual as part of a collective audience). The birth of the museum in fact marks a tipping point in the history of individualization in that it specifically addresses the individual who understands herself first and foremost as such. Crucial to this notion of the individual, however, is that he or she differentiates him or herself through material objects. As a prime place where material objects are valued and quasi-worshipped, the exhibition (and the art exhibition in particular) actively constructs a relationship between the production of subjectivity and the production of material