The experience of art today and the meaning of experience in the artworld shape how identity and discourses around identity function with respect to the “metadata” (and the aura) of art. Metadata are commonly described as all the information about a work or artist that serves to identify and classify. For artworks, this includes basic identifying information such as title, date, medium, editions information, and dimensions as well as price, signature, provenance, and additional information such as condition and framing. To that, we can add all reproductions of an artwork and secondary materials produced for various media including press releases, exhibition photos, audio guides, brochures, flyers, catalogues, social media entries, guided tour narratives, short videos, etc. How you experience these metadata is directly related to how you experience the assumed identity of the artist. Nevertheless, to discuss identity, I would like to first discuss metadata and the value of experience.

The Use Value of Experience
Speaking of experience, you may ask yourself, why on earth, in today’s art world, experience is habitually considered to be a good thing in-itself. Why is experience ‘in’? And how come identity is treated as a valuable function whereby experience is key?
It is always easy to belittle ‘art speak,’ so to say, but even if we are not operating in the realm of an absolute standard or deliberate ‘art speak,’ experience is usually considered to be better off without the theoretical discourses and narrative frameworks armed with an ambition of attributing meaning to an exhibition. The question is: Why is there so much praise for experience? Is it because experience is somehow still linked with some kind of authenticity?
It is of course possible to see experience as a function of a theory (but that perspective is not common at all).¹ We may find it interesting to observe that there are references that evoke mystical tones when we refer to the art experience. If the subject is art it is always good to keep some notion that is inexplicable at hands reach. But what are we protecting with the shield of inexplicability?
We can argue that the use value of experience, in today’s art world, is best seen as a kind of “treat” (offered to a subtly infantilized art audience) when metadata get too heavy (intellectually) and time-consuming (more “work” than expected). Facial expressions of discontented members of the audience who are strolling through art museums, galleries, biennials and events, who are bored in a timid manner, and tired of too much knowledge and even homework in many cases, thrown at them by seemingly self-appointed authorities, may make you wonder if the problem with contemporary art is potentially that it is more popular than it should be. Contemporary art gets more and more attention from the press, various media and culture in general yet it is not so much based on entertainment in the way any mainstream discipline is, like popular cinema, or bestselling literature. Layers and layers of meaning that should be dug through meticulously and enormous numbers of hidden cross-references require serious devotion of time for a better understanding of the works and exhibitions promoted.
This leads to a practical problem: There is a growing popularity but the art that is promoted is not that easy to consume. It demands quite a lot of time, energy and willingness to really get into many meaningful strata of artworks exhibited. Still, a lot has been invested in the contemporary art world, by institutions, by the audience, and by existing cultural structures, and that creates an ambition to further grow and harvest what has been invested by all these parties. As a result, for the general public, the ambition to construct a contemporary artworld, which is even more popular and more meaningful at the same time, is getting bigger every day; it is not possible for the artworld to risk distancing any potential art viewer.
Hence, the artworld cannot risk to create a “wrong” impression of the events it organizes, an impression that would lead the public to think these events are for artworld professionals only. Professionals may enjoy being VIPs as much as they like, but in the end, the event must be as sought after as something sensational. This is effected through the concept of “experience.”
As artworld professionals, we are offering experience to visitors, especially in cases where we are pretty sure that to really get the meaning of what we are doing requires too much work and special interest, which won’t justify the publicity and popularity of the shows we are doing. We may look like a weird army of professionals trying to make an experimental movie a box office hit, or a volume of cutting-edge concrete poetry one of the most read books of the year. Thus instead, in cases where you, as a visitor of an art event cannot get to the bottom of the meaning of an art work, we give you this well decorated concept: experience!
No need to feel outside, no need to grasp the significance of what you are going through, no need to study hard and be able to interpret confidently: you can just experience the art! Simple as that.
In that sense, two issues make things more complicated about what we understand when we talk about an exhibition experience. First of all, the nature of the experience itself is questionable: what form of information does it reflect? And second, the time and location of experience become tricky. Where and when can we locate the experience of a certain exhibition? How to “temporalize” the exhibition experience? Can the art experience begin before or after the exhibition, or does it always have to be simultaneous with it? All the secondary texts about art, all metadata, all data that provide information, all videos, photos, publications, in short, all reproduction – could they all be considered components of the exhibition experience? To quote Boris Groys, these metadata are substituting the lost aura,² – but then, what kind of authenticity can be claimed of experience? And of course, if discursive manipulation is possible why shouldn’t we think of manipulating experience as well?
Emphasis on experience does activate an infantilizing effect on everything related. After a long day at a major art space filled with educational incentives you can easily feel exhausted. After all, you have been reading so many chunks of texts that refer to other chunks and classics and contemporary theory and fiction as well as other texts on other texts, images and other artists. Texts provide new parameters; texts and forms make you think of forms, materials, color and their histories and discussions surrounding them. When you get used to see artworks clustered around forms, colors and materials again and again, when you are exposed to several informative experiments, at the end of day, while you are resting, isn’t it easy to assume that probably all art is art for children today?
While contemplating about the dissimilarities between experiencing an artwork and experiencing its reproductions, maybe it can help to reflect on the moment an artist experiences being an artist. Keeping in mind the famous saying by E. H. Gombrich, “There really is no such thing as art. There are only artists”³, it becomes all the more impactful to imagine how an artist experiences being an artist.
Grayson Perry takes this problem to be one about courage. You need to dare to say, “I am an artist,” he insists. Imagine a party situation, when someone you don’t know approaches and asks, “what do you do?” and you answer this question with a simple “I am an artist.” Actually, Perry is discussing the boundary between being a student and becoming an artist. “What this boundary is made of I am not sure.” He adds “I think it is about identity. At some party someone will ask you what you do, and you will reply, ‘I’m an artist.’ You have to summon up the courage to say it.”⁴
Perry shows that this is a huge transgression, a step towards the other side. Dare to say that and you are an artist. And you enter the realm of experiencing the life of an artist. Interesting, isn’t it, to conceive that it all starts with embracing an identity, and if Gombrich is right, if there are only artists, then this could mean there are only identities. But things take a new turn with contemporary identities in the artworld. Imagine the same party, the same artist, with a twist in the dialogue:

—What do you do?
—I am a Kurdish artist in Turkey.

—What do you do?
—I am an activist artist.

—What do you do?
—I am a feminist artist.

Would you do that? Would you give any of these answers? And if the answer is no, why not?
Well, maybe it will not be your first sentence to describe yourself, but in the, say, first paragraph, would you lay your identity references openly on the table? Doesn’t this seem a bit more likely to happen? Just like saying “I am in sales”, would you say: “I am in arts, with an identity.”?
If I say “I am an artist because I do create art objects or I am capable of creating art objects,” I do give less importance to experience, and consequently process. Identity is quite irrelevant if the issue is creating art objects with aesthetic value. Schools may still be considered relevant, yet not so much in terms of identity but rather as a style.
On the other hand, as you entrust more to experience you get further away from the art object concept. A growing emphasis on experience and process means giving more importance to daily life, giving equal value to other experiences rather than glorifying aesthetic experience, the need for a “genius touch” becomes less significant, skills become less and less of a game changer, and the discourses surrounding all these become more and more effective. Thus, metadata become more crucial. Here, identity is discovered as a rival to schools and styles. Then, a counter-concept of metadata appears: the inexplicable. Identities always explain and stabilize – gestures of uniqueness work the other way around. But that creates a new avant-garde rage against academism. Because academism loves the inexplicable, the unique, the one with skills creating the art object. Consequently, the old discussion is awakened: Is it better if the artwork has an orientation, choice, tendency, or is it better if it is just about form, shape, skill, and the inexplicable?
Let’s go back in time a bit. Decades ago, in 1943, June 7th, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb sent an open letter to The New York Times. This was actually a manifesto-like letter, it did include the taste of a polemical piece, declaring the artistic position of the duo.⁵ In that letter, they say:

“The point at issue, it seems to us, is not an ‘explanation’ of the paintings but whether the intrinsic ideas carried within the frames of these pictures have significance. We feel that our pictures demonstrate our aesthetic beliefs, some of which we, therefore, list:
1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.
2. This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.
3. It is our functions as artists to make the spectator see the world our way—not his way.
4. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.
5. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.”

Consequently, if our work embodies these beliefs, it must insult anyone who is spiritually attuned to interior decoration; pictures for the home; pictures for over the mantle; pictures of the American scene…
Thereby the question arises: if the subject of an artwork should be important so that we do not fall into the trap of academism, then shall identity references be considered a site of resistance against academism?
I guess the answer lies in the role they play. Would identity issues really provide the tragic and timeless subject matter as they imply? Because they gesturally do that. Identities are about real-life issues, they usually refer to real and existing pain, and mostly a kind of pain that has a time dimension – which goes back centuries. But on the other hand, identities can also be so cliché, so regulated, so predictable and politically correct and consumable. İdentity as a subject matter can itself be a tool for academism, providing appropriated and moderated tragic subjects. Identities represent extreme inequalities and events in a nonextreme, classified way.
Here, in the Rothko-Gottlieb letter, the interesting point is to find this emphasis on art having a subject matter in a manifesto-like text of new art, in an avant-garde moment of disengagement.
Regarding art history, it could be argued that at the end of 19th century, after ages of art serving other purposes, which was the norm, there came “art for art’s sake” as Théophile Gautier classically put it; and here, in the open letter to the editor, Rothko and Gottlieb are turning back to the pre-modern, archaic and primitive (an early postmodern turn in a way) and an early harbinger of contemporary art’s dispute with modernity. With a sharp smell of romanticism, Rothko and Gottlieb are turning their faces to the primitive and archaic just like shamans who were not humancentric at all and who favored myths. For many Indians everything was a you (thou), not only human beings but all alive things and rocks and trees.⁶
There are always stories in myths about the end of the world. But the end of the world itself has mythological dimensions. Avoiding that end requires heroic struggles and interventions.
But think of a plastic bottle in the middle of an ocean as a symbol of a fact that will bring the end of the world. Doesn’t it look like an absurd myth? Sometimes we do absurd heroic acts to stop that absurd end: like carrying paper bags home from the super market. Or not using a certain deodorant. Absurd heroism of activist art has similar gestures.
The artwork cannot be the work of a genius, a brilliant masterpiece if it is about any subject, Rothko and Gottlieb were saying, subject matter is important and the artwork protects itself from academism and decoratively production by the sublime qualities of its subject matter. That’s why the subject matter has to be tragic and timeless, that is why it is linked to the primitive and archaic: the magic of the genius artist takes its inspiration from art for art’s sake, and when this magic is cancelled, when it does not continue being legitimate, art needs a new magic – and this new magic comes from the myth, the tragic, the timeless, the elusiveness of all these, the inexplicability of the primitive and archaic.
And the themes that we now collect under “identity” are full of such references. But what if the myth itself is washed with the absurd? The end of the world is a tragic and timeless subject matter. But think of the absurd reaction: saving the world by shopping correctly.
Rothko-Gottlieb are against an artistic experience dictated by the modern conception of the artist and this concept underlines the production of the artwork. The artist, throwing herself out into the world whilst producing art – maybe like an action painter? Shall we find the artistic moment within the parameters of the production phase of the artwork? Can we tolerate when theory comes after?
When art doesn’t allow such a production moment, when it doesn’t want to establish itself like this, then the artist appears as a type whose position is the position of a controller, whose hands are on the events, who has a certain scheme for things. Maybe today the new action painter is the visitor. It is the visitor who will experience a special moment of encountering or finding herself with art.

But Who Is The Visitor?
The visitor of an exhibition is like a visiting academic in a university, a visitor is a visiting ‘experiencer,’ a visiting art lover. She is only there for fun, but mostly for completing the art by attending, working for a fixed period of time for the sake of art by giving her attention and opening her body and participation to interactive art.
Today, a visitor is usually a visiting artist in the sense that there are no more boundaries between the artist and the viewer. Therefore, following Grayson Perry’s formula, you pass the boundary of being a student, dare to say ‘I am an artist’, embrace this identity, become an artist, and right after that, lend that identity to others, make it public, invite everyone be a part of the artist’s aura.
Yet, a visitor is still someone who is on a visit. Either in a gallery or in a museum, or in the artwork as a performance, none of this is her home. A visitor is someone who is playing the game away from home, member of an away team. Visitor is like a migratory bird present in the art space for only the time of her specific visit.
The word visiting itself signifies a shadow position produced for the metadata. Metadata reconstruct the “dared” identity in the form of art, make it both accessible and exhausting at the same time. In time, editing the content and form of metadata become sophisticated and itself artistic. As a result, experiencing the metadata of an artwork becomes art itself more easily. This can again be discussed by means of the paths available for the visitor.
A reader reads the book, a viewer views the movie, an audience listens to the concert, but what does a visitor do with an artwork? What to do with an artwork? Shall we visit it? View it? Participate? Shall we be the one who experiences it? Instead of being a visitor could we just experience it? And be the person who experiences it? But this is not what a visitor actually is; the place of the exhibition experience is actually vague, obviously there are many experiences within these metadata, the times to experience metadata itself. The main thing a visitor visits could be a space of experience then.
On the other hand, it is possible to experience art by visiting other places? You do not necessarily have to visit the artwork for that. Libraries, for example, or any computer screen with internet access will do.
The Argentinian writer César Aira, in his short book on contemporary art,⁷ talks about his experience while he flips through art magazines and to his surprise sees that the pages are not very attractive. The reader flips through pages and what she sees is very unlike a visual festival. No visual appeal, no proper continuation of images. They are visually disappointing. In time, Aira understands that reproduction is itself becoming a work of art, or more precisely, art without work. “Art becomes a fantastic game with time, a documentation of something that used to be a promise of things to come,” says Aira.
By “reproduction,” Aira means more or less metadata. All secondary texts could be seen as art without work; all press releases, exhibition reviews, exhibition views, all of that. This is a bit different from Groys – metadata is not there to substitute the lost aura when it is all reproduction. Metadata create a whole new aura without the actual work. And this is a well-edited and well-curated aura most of the time. Metadata itself is the construction of aura, even aura itself, art (and all its claims of aura) are now metadata and metadata can function before or after the realization of the artwork and in some cases even when the work has never been realized.
You may sometimes hear visitors complaining: “Why do you call this video art instead of saying what it is: a documentary?” Why do you call these archival documents an installation, when they are just the exhibit of an archive?
What happens in the layer that differentiates art from a documentary? Is that layer mainly made of experience or it is discourse-based? The complaining visitor believes it is discourse-based. A misconduct of/with identity.
In the contemporary artworld, an artwork turning into its own image, or an image of the image of an artwork turning into a brand-new artwork, is a pretty common, familiar process and implies that no image can remain to be a reproduction permanently. At least, this is not guaranteed. A document can turn into an artwork; metadata can become aura and can cause the production of new metadata. Art reconstitutes itself in these series of acts that keep moving it further away from the origin.
In that sense we understand that the visitor is not mainly visiting art but the artwork – as art is being produced in many other venues/media (all reproductions) and circulates through various channels and gets multiplied on the way. The thing that exists in a certain place and waits for a visit is not art but the artwork, that’s why the visiting of that artwork is only the function of an art view that has been shaped before. The souvenirs and other materials we carry home after a visit (publications, visual and textual documents, gifts) could maybe called a return visit.

Mirrored Butterfly
The reader is inside the book, the viewer inside cinema, the audience inside a concert, but it is difficult to say the same for the visitor. The visitor is an outsider, she comes from the outside and stays outside the exhibition, she comes for a visit and leaves again (even while she is still in the salon, but in the next room, she is considered “gone”). While leaving, she takes her experience, the exhibition guide, and photos she took of the exhibition (visuals she owns, images she appropriated, her own reproductions) with her. Thus, she takes from the artwork without lessening the work – or, she “loots” art from the surplus produced by art.
Consequently, we better understand why a visitor is not an art lover anymore. Not only because the term art lover is considered to be too naive in today’s standards of consuming art, or because it makes it possible for the art audience to look down upon the rest (art lovers are better positioned than the ones that don’t love art) but because art functions pretty well without the work. Visiting an art gallery/museum doesn’t exactly mean you are a lover of art. Art is not the object or the arrangement of space, or the management of institutions, art is everywhere in all forms – but still, you are maybe a lover of experience. Art is everywhere, in all possibilities, where the artist is and does whatever she can do, in all texts that can be produced relatedly, all drawing and sketches, photos and discourses. And obviously, you favor the experience of a certain place to an experience of metadata.
Even so, we should turn back to Aira’s “art after and before birth” notion,⁸ where he says “art becomes a slightly fantastical game with time: it is the documentation of something that was, and at the same time a promise of something that will be. Unborn and posthumous. Perhaps this has always been the work of art: a being of precarious and ambiguous existence, suspended between the before and after…”
Art tests its own temporality, which begins much before the realization of the artwork and may continue after it is completed, not with experience but with relations, conceptions and accumulation, and suggests an experience that goes beyond these unsympathetic words of mediation.
Then, if art is from the very beginning that thing which has a precarious and ambiguous existence, a thing suspended between a “before” and an “after,” then the experience of an exhibition can be thought of as an act of swinging between a “pre-visit” and “post-visit;” in short, as a kind of void that opens up enabling one to get over the state of being an actual visitor. Being a visitor could even be thought of as a preparatory stage in which the art experience is suspended.
Another question follows from this: Can you visit an artwork which is not actually there? There are differences, both in the sense of collective memory and the common unconscious between experiencing an exhibition room by room slowly alone or with a crowd (and to know that you will be counted within the X hundred thousand/million people who visit the same room this year) and visiting the same exhibition with a bunch of VIP collectors, during set-up or in the storage. During openings of exhibitions, you hear many people say that it is not possible to properly experience the artwork. Yet, this uncomfortable time for experience is usually the most crowded moment of the place. During an opening, you do not only visit the artwork but also the art itself – it is a special moment because it is the only time you can visit them both.
In César Aira’s novel An Episode In The Life Of a Landscape Painter, a European painter, Rugendas, travels through the American continent, painting on the way, and dreams of passing through exactly the same spots for a second time in the future. In his dream, he passes through the same places and meets the same people. And his “artist’s imagination figured this second voyage as the other wing of a vast, mirrored butterfly.”⁹
That passage always comes to my mind when, at exhibition openings, I hear people dreaming about visiting the exhibition again. Passing through the same corridors, the same phases, and the same texts, looking for the other wing of a vast, mirrored butterfly.
Later, in the news, regarding the end of the world, we read that two young scientists did find bacteria that eat plastic.¹⁰ Scientists have improved a naturally occurring enzyme which can digest some of our most commonly polluting plastics. An absurd final to an absurd tragedy – bacteria save the world by eating plastic?!
A genius who survives by eating nothingness, presents a savior dimension (represented in the scientist or the artist). Artistic identities themselves are absurd most of the time –especially when they are politically charged in a cliché way. Rothko-Gottlieb in their striking formulation said, “There is no such thing as good painting on nothing.”
Let’s see what this saying will look like if we reverse it: “There is nothing as good as a painting about nothing.” Can we imagine using this formulation for an absurd representation of the identities behind artists today in a fictive sentence on a fictive exhibition: “There is nothing as good as the nothingness captured by a good photographer while she is taking a good exhibition view photo to be published alongside a good exhibition review that is in fact based on a good press release which conceptualize a good group exhibition where a good artwork about nothing would certainly fit in.”

 

 

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