Theater, Garden, Bestiary

A Materialist History of
Exhibitions
 Exhibitions

Introduction
The history of exhibitions is currently undergoing renewed interest. While
today the medium of exhibition is a producer of specific discourses, and while
it offers new practices a stage on which to emerge, it has also become the nexus
of numerous institutional neo-positivisms relating to the ontological designa-
tion art. The exhibition, in the search for its reflexive forms (as in the quest
for its own modernism) seems to become a genre in its own right. By distancing
itself from todays flurry of studies related to curating, this research project will
draft a history of exhibitions sourced from a wide corpus reaching beyond the
framework of artistic institutions.

Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions is a HES-SO/Uni-

versity of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland & ECAL/Uni-
versity of Art and Design Lausanne research project.
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The exhibition as a genre and the generic instance of art

The research project Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of
Exhibitions stems from the wish to consider the exhibition as a genre, and to
question its place in an expanded geography of borders and conceptual divides
that have historically structured the space of art, and which continue to under-
lie its situation today. Its aim is to consider anew the genre of exhibition, by
grounding it both in the history of modernism and in modernity as a whole,
that is, in what one may call the anthropological matrix of modernity: its onto-
logical separations, its epistemic divisions, its political economy, its sense of the
negative.

The research group gathered for this project is invited to work on the inscrip-
tion of the history of exhibition and of the space of art into the wider field of an
intellectual, aesthetic, technological, and political history of modernity. The
aim is to isolate the historical construction of a body of epistemological scripts
within the currently very open concept of exhibition, allowing us to grasp the
implicit contracts, rules, and norms inscribed in the genre.
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Through the reconstitution of some of the debates which have stirred the ex-
hibition of art throughout modernism and the postmodern moment, and the
simultaneous inscription of these debates into an anthropological history of
modernity, this project aims at reconstructing and developing a theoretical
model of the genre of exhibition and of its conditions of possibility. This re-
search is thus not entirely a historical project, but rather an archeological one,
in the methodological sense of the term: it consists in excavating underground
dynamics to bring them up to the analytical and descriptive surface, be they his-
torical trajectories or objects of contemporary curatorial and artistic experi-
mentation.

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The exhibition, between Clinic and Salon: a history of

limits
Due to its institutional history, the exhibition is situated at the tipping point
between the positive scientific fact (of which the logico-spatial order at work in
the museum is a materialization) and the negative space of art (of which aesthet-
ic modernism and its tendency towards the transgression of modern limits is an
expression). In more visual terms, the role of the exhibition may be represented
in the constitution of the modern knowledge order as the fruit of the articula-
tion between what Michel Foucault named the clinic, and what Denis Di-
derot reconstructed in his Salons.

The genre of exhibition, at the hinge of these modes of visibility and of these
regimes of discursivity, appears to consist of a particular scenography of the
The genre of exhibition, at the hinge of these modes of visibility and of these
regimes of discursivity, appears to consist of a particular scenography of the
conceptual limits running through modernity. As such, it stages the borders
that cross and articulate the modern world, and mediates its ontological desig-
nations. This project proposes to study the articulation of the genre of exhibi-
tion to these designations, as well as its role in their historical constitution, by
envisioning the exhibition as an apparatus that oscillates between the epistemo-
logy of representation and the anthropology of presentation.

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By inviting philosophers, art historians, anthropologists, historians of science,
artists, cultural theorists, and curators to consider the role of scientific and
artistic exhibitions in the constitution of these designations, this laboratorys
ambition is to 1) synthetically reconstruct the ways in which the exhibition,
through the museological apparatus, has consisted in a stage of crystallization
and explicitation of the economy of modern knowledge, 2) describe in a stereo-
scopic fashion the epistemological scripts that symmetrically articulate the ex-
hibition of scientific objects and the exhibition of artworks, 3) uncover in
normative ways a sum of theoretical and practical proposals on the type of con-
ceptual traction that the genre of exhibition may have over the future of the
space of art.

From the museums emergence as an implicit frame for both scientific objectiv-
ity and modern aesthetic subjectivity, to certain contemporary exhibition prac-
tices, through the turning point of the anti-formalist debates that stirred art
theory at the turn of the 1960s, our enquiry shall recount the historical trans-
formations that have affected the genre of exhibition, while systematically
grounding these transformations in the epistemological backdrop against which
grounding these transformations in the epistemological backdrop against which
they took place, that is to say, onto a cartography of the divides that modern
thought has imprinted on the world, which it has naturalized into an ontologic-
al ground, and in which our institutions of knowledge and our thought categor-
ies have been crafted.

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A materialist history
The critical history of art as it has been practiced in the 20th century has some-
how put aside the material, concrete and factual history of the constitution of
the space of art as an extra-territorial space in the topos of modernity. Within
this critical art history, artistic practices have often been considered as being an
alternative order to the forces and objects of the material world. In a certain
way, art has been interpreted as being outside of (or in excess of) the descriptive
capacities of reason, language, and science.

The research project Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions

proposes a renewed focus on the semiotic-material articulation of the genre of
exhibition with its anthropological and ontological backdrops, as well as on the
historical transformations of the ways in which these backdrops have shaped
the genre. This research is thus motivated by the desire to reach a point of
enunciation from which one might seize the borders and limits which, from the
exhibition space, outline the generic instance of art, as much through their con-
temporary structural forms as through their historical cast shadows, in order
to situate the role of the exhibition in the comprehension of its formal, concep-
tual, and political operations.
tual, and political operations.

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Program of the lab

From September 2015 to December 2016, the labs activity will take the form of
a series of ten to fifteen one-day conferences at ECAL/University of Art and
Design Lausanne, organized around specific theoretical perspectives. During
these conferences, around thirty speakers will be invited to articulate their re-
search to the topic of the conference, and to discuss it with the students re-
searchers in a workshop session.

From January to December 2017, the preparation of a book gathering the con-
tributions of the guest speakers will be interspersed with a series of events (sym-
posiums, projections, workshops) carried out in cooperation with several inter-
national partner institutions (museums, art centers, universities, research
units).

The book published at the end of the labs activity will be bilingual, edited by
two international publishing houses. Additional information to follow.
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Contact
For all inquiries and to subscribe to our newsletter, please email us at theat-
ergardenbestiary@ecal.ch (mailto:theatergardenbestiary@ecal.ch)