Preliminary notes towards an (im)possible exhibition
From the city of Bern I have been asked to organize an exhibition which deals with Harald Szeemann’s intellectual and spiritual legacy. Not wanting to make an homage (which is more the type of project for a museum and for sure is a more documentary move), in the same time, I didn’t want to give in to a hypocritical demand, celebrating Mr. Szeemann in a place – the Kunsthalle Bern – where he at the end had such a hard time that he finally decided to leave… Still an exhibition could be made out of this weird mixture of ideas conjuring up with the outside demands to do something with/about or in relation to Szeemann.
Harald Szeemann’s independent organisation AGENTUR FÜR GEISTIGE GASTARBEIT had no objective other than communicating his vision of a radically different zone of energy, passion, and intensity. Every show he did from the early ’70s until the very end was defined as “spiritual guest work,” made in the service of “a possible visualization of a museum of obsessions.” The only museum Szeemann was truly interested in, he said, was the one in his own head: an imaginary, other worldly entity, a kind of utopian sphere that actual exhibitions could only hint at. It was, he insisted, a museum of obsessions: “Where no obsessions are to be discerned. I have no reason to linger.”
So I wanted to curate an exhibition which deals both with the complex and ambiguous notion of respect (in the context of the ‘bigger than life’ story of the perception of Szeemann as a curator internationally, but also the reflex of the establishment in a provincial town to celebrate a former rebel) on the one hand and some of Szeemans ‘obsessions’ (the a-historical approach, the process of creating, the visionary, the individual mythology, the total work of art, the encyclopedia …) on the other hand, transferred to this (im)possible place (Villa Jelmini).
The realm of the actual exhibition (Villa Jelmini) functions as yet another, or a next heterotopia in relation to both a group of received iconic images of 20th century art, and to Szeemann’s utopian museum of obsessions. Villa Jelmini takes his exhibitions in account as mnemonic traces, wherein even involuntary symptoms may yet contain re-activating elements. So the actual exhibition’s gravitational focus can be considered as a real space with the characteristics of a ‘deviation’ or a ‘crisis’ within a complex relay of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts. What is left is the exhibition itself as an independent organisational structure.
The curatorial legacy of Harald Szeemann would be the starting point for an exhibition that analyses the (im)possibility to construct a space where different memories, traditions can meet. Is it possible to demonstrate an “other” to our system of thought and how can we then specify this otherness? The impossibility of a “common ground” within the widened understanding of art might be the most interesting outcome of Szeemanns curatorial practice. What is destroyed is the “site,” the “mute ground upon which it is possible for entities to be juxtaposed. The impossibility of the encyclopedia is the impossibility for a certain thought to think difference in itself, with no relation to identity: in Hegelian terms, diversity with no relation to opposition, contradiction and finally ground. Concentrating on this ‘disturbing of identity’ thought the show deals with the heteroclite and the heterotopia, and connects it to aphasia: loss of what is common to place and name.
Villa Jelmini: a place that is out of the ordinary, the peripheral – in its non-geopolitical sense – or the displaced. In contrast to utopia, with its symbolic meaning of an ideal place which exists physically nowhere but in its representations, Villa Jelmini becomes an actual place “somewhere” which incommensurability makes it a site of instability and contravention.
‘Respect’, this combination of fear and honour, as another point of attention in the exhibition, is a strange concept. Fear which honours; honour which is pervaded by fear. What kind of fear could that be? Certainly not the kind of fear that comes upon us in the face of something harmful or that causes pain. That kind of fear causes us to defend ourselves and to seek safety. This show on the contrary wants to create a space of vulnerability, where the ghosts of Szeemann’s ‘obsessions’ linger. This exhibition is constructed, departing from the ‘negative’ of the exhibition and connecting these metonymic fragments in memory, we may come familiar with an exhibition we have not actually seen. Clearly though, this ‘exhibition’ – a heterogeneous psychical object, constructed from artworks scattered in space and time.
(Villa Jelmini is a wine cherished by Szeemann. His archive was mostly stored in empty Villa Jelmini wine boxes)
Philippe Pirotte