The Conspiracy brings together work from an extensive group of local and international artists, whose participative, confrontational or more hermetic practice is motivated by a discerning, sophisticated and sometimes perverse, play of interpretation and meaning/ significance. Together they span different generations, so that various strategies for public (non-)interaction engage one another. The Conspiracy is an investigation into the perception and reception of art in the public debate and comes at a moment in time when public art institutions increasingly have to resolve a contradiction between an ‘art-focused’ and a ‘spectator-focused’ approach. As an exhibition, The Conspiracy testifies of the ways in which artists construct various understandings or refusals regarding the public.
As a basic characteristic of a cultural object is its (supposed) significance or ‘meaning’ beyond its physical fact, art regularly encounters demands of legitimisation. Since a structural split between ‘meaning’ and the physical fact became part of our way to perceive the world and its representations, there is a possibility to consider the ‘meaning’ of cultural objects as arbitrary. Moreover, often the criticism is heard that the spectator is fooled by the art proposed and modern and contemporary art have been subject to the suspicion that ‘the meaning of art’ is somehow conspiratorial in nature. The ‘suspicion’ is as old as the advent of the avant-garde, but it was Jean Baudrillard who infuriated the art world with his text Le Complot de l’Art, published in the French newspaper Libération in 1996. In the article, Baudrillard claimed that art exists everywhere but in art, and that it has become a case of insider trading (the term is frequently used to refer to a practice in which an insider or a related party trades, based on material non-public information obtained during the performance of the insider’s duties at the corporation). Baudrillard also expressed concern that art has become tainted with the close and oppressive relationship between artist and consumer, with the obscenity of visibility because of the inexorable transparency of everything, and with the lack of formal difference between art and reality. According to Baudrillard, just as in porn every illusion of desire is lost, art had lost all desire for illusion. It feeds back endlessly into itself and it had turned its own disappearance into an art unto itself. Hovering between aesthetic insignificance and commercial frenzy, Baudrillard considered art trans-aesthetic: a pornography of transparency that one can only experience with irony and indifference. Moreover, Le Complot de l’Art strongly questioned art’s privileged status, attributed by its practitioners.
Baudrillard’s ideas were en vogue twenty years ago. He sought for an art experience freed from the (conspirational?) mediation of curators and gallery owners. Ironically it is his call for distance and his appeal to a ‘proper to art’ – a certain differentiality(? differentiation?) – which is exactly criticised today by populist politicians and cultural brokers (favouring ‘art-events’ with an easy access), as some of the main characteristics of a conspiracy of art. Practicing a language outside of common communication, and resisting conventional ways of making sense, art might seem to place the spectator at the opposite side of illumination. Communicative ambiguity, irreducible opacity and thickness are considered highly suspicious today, when art manifestations are more and more expected to bring into publicly discussable form that which is being ignored, left unattended, or relegated to the ‘outside’ of the political process. But, as another French thinker, Jacques Rancière, wrote more recenctly, art doesn’t become political by representing structures of society, conflicts or identities of specific social groups. Art is political because of the distance it can take from these functions, by the type of temporality and space it constitutes and by the way it tailors this temporality and populates this space. That what is ‘proper to art’, according to Rancière, is exactly this reorganisation of a space towards the creation of a material and symbolic territory of the common. But most importantly, it aims at constituting disagreement within this territory of the common that has to be created ever and again.
With this exhibition, we try, as controversial anarchist essayist Hakim Bey proposes, to construct a poetics of conspiracy: “A conspiracy would be treated like an aesthetic construct, or a language-construct, and could be analyzed like a text.” Because as fictional conspiracy, with a paradoxical combination of preciseness and ambiguity, art could exactly expose the conspiracy of the mass media with its manipulative ‘publicness’ and forge a ‘counter-publicness’. Maybe in relation to the mass media, exhibitions then function as ‘Pirate Utopias’, secret islands once used for supply purposes by pirates existing beyond the realm and reach of governments, from where a mental and emotional signifying space is opened, outside the usual conditioning of meaning. As a performance of stubborn autonomy versus the evidence of understanding, and as a momentum for a critical locus versus instrumental (practical, functional, economic) reason, an exhibition then creates a new territory of the moment, possibly in complicit disguise, on the boundary line of established regions.
The Conspiracy inscribes itself in a series of group-shows held at Kunsthalle Bern over the last years (Off Key (2005), Pre-Emptive (2006), A Fantasy for the Moment (2007) and You Don’t Have to Understand Everything We do to Profit From It at Liste in Basel this year), that eschew to account for their existence towards the practical demands of the contemporary economical and socio-political realm, and resolutely invest in what Bertrand Russel called ‘useless knowledge’.