»Question about Art or Non-Art Turned to Dust Anyway«

Peter Sloterdijk’s imagination constructs a parliament that can be dropped from a military aircraft on countries needing help with instant democracy. The price of this pop dome: nine million US dollars. The philosopher is now roaming conceptual paths. But, in contrast to concept art, he does not reveal his references. The »blow-up parliament« he has ironically imagined exists as an electronically generated scenography, accompanied by a video interview and leaflets. One would like to ask the master of the »Critique of Cynical Reason« why he includes Sudan among the rogue states. But he is busy demonstrating prolonged one-way communication on the video. Bruno Latour imagines taking a seat under the dome, »one’s finger still red from the unwashable ink«.1 Isn’t this all together somewhat too much mimicry?
This fable is part of the exhibition »Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy« at the ZKM. As opposed to »Iconoclash« of 2002, which focused on fundamentalism and the crisis of representation, this show, again co-curated by Peter Weibel, has still more of the trademark of the guest curator, Latour. What is pleasing to see in »Making Things Public« is an increased interest in group works. Most of the projects are collective ones. Now to the next piece of news: Latour is a sociologist of science, not an art historian. He has better contacts to the academic scene. Many more academics are now participating. If perhaps two hundred arts scholars have their say in the around one hundred projects, the estimated 36 artists included in this number are pushed more into a niche category. Sometimes all of those identified as »academics, activists and artists« in the concept worked in groups as well. The proportional intersections are moreover distributed in such a way that it is above all philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, ethnologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, researchers on animal behaviour, zoologists and botanists who show what they can do. They visualise their knowledge of »things«. That is what Latour calls the themes and problems that they make public. Of course, they use audio-visual technologies to do this. »No issue – no public. No mediation – no public« is the very formulistic catchphrase. It is not so much the natural sciences that get a look in, in other words, those that have long dominated the medial discourses as »leading sciences«. Among the exceptions are Pablo Jensen’s demonstration posters »How do you represent electron groups?«
Unfortunately, this »thought exhibition« (Gedankenausstellung) fails completely to establish feedback cycles between experts and non-experts. It is here that its curatorial dilemma becomes apparent. For the theories underpinning this show, in which the public is imagined as »monster« and «phantom«, are torn apart by intellectual intentions that are hard to represent. The concept of »phantom public« haunts the entire endeavour. In the very first place as the extremely irritating »gesamtkunstwerk« of this name by Jarrennou, in which everything present in the room is shredded visually and acoustically by the electronic mincer. This is automatically controlled by a wickedly expensive and controversial RFID electronic control system.2 It produces only disco effects. But it frustrates every attempt to give adequate concentration to the more complicated themes. For example, if you want to focus on Patricio Guzmán’s documentary film on Chile (89 min., 1976, Spanish), you are blinded by the dazzling spotlights of the Phantom. All around you there is flashing, banging and bubbling. This unscrupulous event falls upon you again shrilly at the very next object. You take flight. »Phantom Public« also alludes to a book by Walter Lippmann of 1925 in which he described how there was no subject and no group(s) in society (any more) that was able to comprehend, recognise and represent all the interests of the public sphere.3 John Dewey’s reaction to Lippmann’s text is also referred to. These are seminar topics that cannot be exhibited. You can write dissertations and theses on them. So this exhibition is casting its bait to catch a lurking monster? But for whom is it intended? Never at a loss for a grotesque joke, Peter Weibel admits: »As Nietzsche writes in Zarathustra, »for everyone and no one«.4
What is shown is simply »things« the groups named are working on. Which spaces and types of assembly are and were preferred in the wide, globalised world. What instruments are used for this purpose. The ZKM becomes an a-historical »chamber of wonders« of »themes« that drift far apart from one another: pictures, architectural models, notice boards, buttons, technological platforms and networks that stand both for old and new systems of assembly are all added together in unconnected fashion. One section with miniature models, for example, is devoted to the »comparative study« of parliament architecture from 400 B.C. to the present day. At a completely different end of the exhibition there are also photos of thingsteads, where justice used to be administered in earlier times. The history of architecture, natural history and legal history are all jumbled together. It is an interlocking mixture of themes that merely run alongside each other. But: »Why not compare them all with each other?«, the curator triumphs in his treatise. This is an even bigger problem. For all these jumbled-together objects cannot be »compared« simultaneously in their totality. The exhibition is obviously looking for a Promethean »universal scholar« who would be able to manage the job empirically. For this reason, pragmatists and realists prefer to limit themselves to exploring in detail just a few projects in this chaotic jigsaw puzzle of ideas spread over 2,500 square metres.
In view of the fact that the science historian from Paris admitted several times to the press, in an astonishingly frank manner, that the exhibition was »an amazing assembly of completely disjoined things«, it would seem essential to try to establish historical selectivities and clear delineations. However, there are no explanations of how and why artists and scientists use the audiovisual media in different ways, for example. What kinds of haziness results from their working with the same technological instruments? Confusions? As far as this aspect is concerned, the apparently theoretically strong exhibition »Making Things Public«, which exercises in ahistorical thinking, is amazingly guileless and speculative.
In fact, however, more and more academics and scientists – and social groups in general – show a desire for »aesthetic strategies« in the way they are turning to images. There are more and more image producers. The »thing« is a vague mass phenomenon. The concept »aesthetic strategies« has been used in art criticism since about 1970.5 Since then, it has been happily brought into circulation in other areas as well. Scientists also really use the attitudes inscribed in the word: »strategy« is namely the term, originally from the field of military tactics, for a deliberate plan. It is not only in the military field that this word, which also occurs in everyday connotations like »survival strategies« or »learning strategies«, means an attempt to gain power and superiority. »The question of art or non-art has already been turned to dust because of >Iconoclash« [the preceding exhibition that he curated himself in 2002]«, says Bruno Latour, working hard at his heroic epos.6 A shift of practice connected only with power – the »practical turn« in the scientific labyrinth – is thus displayed at the ZKM. Theories are still missing. A new hierarchy has already been set up. First the scientists and academics, then the artists and political activists. What empirical philosophy is behind this? Have scientists studied exhibition catalogues and visited galleries? Are they learning »aesthetics« solely for their profession? No: they label, out and »auratise« themselves and their assistants and relations across the board as artists. They are also all listed as such on the ZKM Web site.7
Many of the objects shown, however, emerged from teaching situations at universities. This was the case, for example, with the text-based Internet project »Controverses« by Paris students, which shows how up-and-coming engineers learn to use technologies and represent social controversies. Right at the top of the agenda is an ecological dispute about the wolves in the French Alps, which grew to become a socio-political controversy. It is treated under the motto »Is the co-habitation with the wolves in France possible?«. All groups had Webmasters in charge of design. No one is doubting that necessary learning goals are accumulated here. What comes about is the design of teaching materials. But where is the artist? On a card on the wall with the number 6.03, this flat screen with text is declared to be a work of art. Courtesy of the artists: Bruno Latour. A comparatively lavish six-canal video installation from Harvard (Boston) looks like a sophisticated advertisement for laboratories and lecture theatres.
These diffuse, audio-visual problematics and their too far-reaching perspective again refer back to the »mimicry« I mentioned at the start of this article. Peter Weibel’s great interest in the »end >of the end of artThe guest curator is interested in picture puzzles. His book »The Parliament of Things« already had a labyrinthine structure fit to make even the most willing reader despair. According to Gustav René Hocke, the labyrinth is the counter-pole to everything that is comprehensible. There is no definite criterion there any more, nor just two truths, but several truths or, indeed, countless truths that lose themselves in inpenetrability.8 Although: Latour did not even invent the figure of the labyrinth that provides the exhibition with its sensory structure. Is he perhaps a mannerist of modernity? As an attitude of mind, mannerism is a power situated between science and art. Can an academic style be mannerist as well? Why not. One follows a predilection for confusion. Even the entrance zone, where there are anthropological glass cabinets about objects and rituals from the indigenous culture that indulge neither in the Euro-American idea of possession nor their ways of assembly, is headed »No politics please«. In didactic fashion, it is also claimed a propos that the exhibition is »not [at all] critical» but »about criticism«. That sounds like twisted metatheses. They are very hard to prove. Shouldn’t one occasionally be able to ask for proofs?
Latour has already felt how this labyrinth of science, presented, in a renunciation that is easy to see through, as being »uncritical« of »politics« and the »market«, has put off the journalists. He finds the press reaction »horrible«. Journalists, like the other viewers, can spend at the most two hours in the exhibition. They then have the hard job of giving an assessment of this complicated, completely unstructured context, of which they have only seen a fragment, completely without the delayed catalogue9 (something which ZKM increasingly demands of them).
During the Second World War, the halls of the ZKM building were used to recruit forced labourers for the production of ammunition parts. The monumentalism of this mighty edifice conditions the movements of the body even today. Admittedly, the long-delayed renovation of the interior with transparent, beautiful labyrinth walls, carried out by Nikolaus Hirsch and Michael Müller, is successful. There is a generous ambience and visitors are no longer compelled to struggle through black boxes.
It opens up like an enormous labyrinth on »mille plateaux« (Deleuze/Guattari)10 with many centres, openings, closures simultaneously. However, it still seems like an unexplained hypertext that has forced its way into the space. There is so much choice, it is hard to decide how to deepen one’s engagement with the discourse. Just like navigating in the Internet. It would not hurt to compare »Making Things Public« with »Les Immatériaux«, the legendary exhibition in Paris in 1986 about the invasion of everyday life by electronic technology. It was also organised by a philosopher (Jean-François Lyotard) and an artist/theorist (Thierry Chaput).11 Notwithstanding this, art works are always being given detailed presentations on guided tours at ZKM. For example, Matthias Gommel’s audio-visual piece »Riverphonics«. It is devoted to the movements of water fleas, which are transmitted to a computer. Which shows the pollution of the Rhine. Abraham Bosse’s frontispiece for Thomas Hobbes’ »Leviathan« (1651) and several picture puzzles taken from popular, mass culture, which are inserted into the exhibition like a small gallery - »The Puzzle of the Assembled Bodies« - are also happily explained. Because one of the countless aims of the exhibition is to promote reflection on »good or bad government«, huge reproductions of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s frescoes »Allegory of Good and Bad Government« from the Palazzo Pubblico in Sienna (1338-40) have a special place. The symbols of good government are represented not only by the idealised virtues of »Concordia«, but also by well-tilled landscapes and variety. On the side of »Discordia«, out-sourced trading systems, ruined architecture and destroyed eco-systems are found instead. »Love justice, ye who rule the Earth!« is the urgent admonition to the rulers on the peaceful side. For where Justitia is not present or even fails, tyranny reigns.
The complex installation »What Is a Body/ a Person? Topography of the Possible« at the very middle of the exhibition is a discovery. This project by XPERIMENT!, the Vienna-based »Research group for experiments with scientific ideas« is a very moving contemporary art work: four-metre-high banners were folded eighty metres long like an organism or an endless film loop. This can be walked through. Observation protocols of patients in a waking coma and severely disabled people in an unnamed clinic in a European city that remains nameless – hundreds of pictures, texts, photos – are to be found on both sides. This diary, recorded with enormous intensity, in which the »love, care, washing...» and other interactions between patients, doctors, care personnel and relatives are observed for 18 months highlights perceptions that deviate from everyday audio-visual media presentations. The group consists of an artist, a doctor, who goes astray as a filmmaker, and a sociologist. Naive faith in science is undermined here. There is talk of a »shared incompetence« between the patients, who cannot even say »yes« or »no«, and those who are responsible for them.
A patented stock-exchange ticker of 1872 made by Thomas Edison is presented like a relic under a glass cover. This object was invented to prevent the chaos and confusion caused by the communication of false information at stock exchanges. Names and prices of stocks and shares, which were printed on a narrow strip of paper, draw attention to public possibilities of control at this early stage of technology. But the US company Diebold still gives no insight into the source code. It produced the electronic touchscreen election machines in most US states. This company, which has close contacts to the Republicans, defends the implemented source code as its property. This means that the decisive infrastructure of American democracy has been made a secret. Ben Rubin addresses the dependence of the elections on this company with »Dark Source«, a multi-part concept art object. He had to black out the source code, which got onto the Internet in 2002 owing to a security fault. The climate of cynicism and mistrust that has resulted from this situation is one explanation for the constantly declining voter turnout in the USA. That is what the artist writes on the walls of the labyrinth. This is one case where the exhibition returns to its theme of »Atmospheres of Democracy« in a shocking manner.
How many problems these days that do not come before parliaments are not perceived at all? Richard Roger’s theme ticker »Old Europe Index«, a cool, amused act of reference to a quote from Donald Rumsfeld, is refreshed every month with »fresh data«. It was first conceived to provide politicians from the Dutch government society »Infodrome« with information on their electronic desks about NGOs from Germany, Italy, Great Britain and Spain. It is not only about information on what real-politicians do in contrast with NGOs, but also the proof that even the attention span that the latter accord to their interests lasts much longer than that which these themes receive in the media. The interactive touchscreen comes from the field of political science. It was designed by a Dutch designer. It can also be found on the Internet: : http://www.infoid.org.

»Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy«, ZKM, Karlsruhe, 20 March to 7 September 2005-08-02

Bruno Latour has taken over the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at Amsterdam University for a year. He will then be teaching at the Institut d’Études Politiques/IEP/Sciences Po Paris.