Looking Away - Participations in Visual Culture, Irit Rogoff
What comes after the critical analysis of culture? What goes beyond the endless cataloguing of the hidden structures, the invisible powers and the numerous offences we have been preoccupied with for so long? Beyond the processes of marking and making visible those who have been included and those who have been excluded? Beyond being able to point our finger at the master narratives and at the dominant cartographies of the inherited cultural order? Beyond the celebration of emergent minority group identities as an achievement in and of itself? Over the past generation we have seen an extensive critique of the museum as everything from the staging ground of national histories to the performative sites of private obsessions. Artists such as Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Spoerri, the Guerilla Girls, Fred Wilson and Barbara Bloom have launched complex stagings of the diavowed dimensions of cultural display. We have even seen institutions such as MOMA/ NY put themselves on supposedly reflexive display by looking at their own practices through the art works that unravel them as “The Museum as Muse”. Spurred on by the work of Michel Foucault , we have looked at issues of categorization and classification, by Haacke at “Museums as Managers of Consciousness” through the machinations of sponsorship, by Daniel Buren at the way museums turn “History into Nature”, From James Clifford we have taken the understanding of the relation between collecting and colonizing and from Hal Foster that between establishing something called “Primitivism” and maintaining the hegemony of the West. From Carol Duncan we have understood how deeply notions of gender are embedded is the museum as a mode of display and a public notion of edifying space while the Guerilla Girls , have documented the continuing absence of women artists from both permanent collections and temporary exhibitions within mainstream American Museum culture. The Canadian artist Vera Frenkel offers another example in her documentary project accompanied by videos and performance activity, entitled “The Cornelia Lumsden Archive”. Frenkel traces, through her veritable absence, the shadowy presence of a fictive 20th century woman writer; she does this by scrupulously emulating the archival modes that would have represented her had she ever existed, which takes us back full circle to Foucault. In Visual Culture some partial responses to the question of what comes after critique can be teased out through a shift of the traditional relations between all that goes into making and all that goes into viewing, the objects of visual cultural attention. This, of course, builds on that mighty critical apparatus which was evolved throughout the 1970s and the 1980s in which an unravelling of the relations between subjects and objects took place through radical critiques of authorial authorities, of epistemological conceits and perhaps more than anything else through the ever growing perception of knowledge as an extended wander through fields of intertextual subjectivities. That project is well underway and in its wake come the permissions to approach the study of culture from the most oblique of angles, to occupy ourselves with the constitution of new objects of study that may not have been previously articulated for us by existing fields. In fact, it may well be in the act of looking away from the objects of our supposed study, in the shifting modalities of the attention we pay them, that have a potential for a re-articultion of the relations between makers, objects and audiences. Can looking away be understood not necessarily as an act of resistance to but rather as an alternative form of taking part in, culture? |
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