Revisiting the 'Exhibitionary Complex': Traditional and Alternative Exhibition Spaces
- Rebecca Sykes
- Apr 25, 2017
- 8 min read
As a student of history and art history, I've certainly heard before that many individuals find museums and art galleries boring, pretentious, perplexing and frustrating. Many people don't know what to make of or take away from exhibitions and they feel very out-of-place in the space of a 'high-brow' museum or art gallery. This is a shame, particularly as most museums are publicly funded, either by government grants or are nationally-owned, and the artifacts and stories they share belong to and are about the public that they aim to serve.
In order to help understand this skepticism the public has for institutions that claim to represent them, let's consider the history of exhibitionary space and the bodies within it.
In his influential essay "The Exhibitionary Complex," Tony Bennett uses Michel Foucault's theories about surveillance and the use of architecture to discipline and segment individual bodies from the masses, to argue that the museum is a classed institution that sought to promote middle and upper class comportment and culture to its working class visitors. This was done with the help of pamphlets with tips on how one ought to conduct oneself in a museum, and, in designing public museums, including spaces for members of the public to overlook the other visitors moving through the galleries, thus making them conscious of their own bodies in the museum and encouraging them to self-regulate their conduct in a respectable manner.
When visitors experience these kinds of traditional exhibitionary spaces in which they are conscious of being seen by other visitors and by the often overzealous eyes of security guards, especially felt by certain demographics of the population, they may be less inclined to linger around the works and consider them, and are more likely to feel like an imposter in this space, alienated from other visitors.
Consider the case of China, which since 1978, has had a mandate to build over 3,500 museums. With many of these museums being grandiose structures financed by the nouveau-riche to promote their own status, these museums lack the collection-oriented focus necessary to establish a museum that will have any public significance.
Chinese investors and architects have created museum structures that promote their high-classed aspirations, but lack the objects and significance of place to tell a meaningful story to the public. As Chinese architect Lyndon Neri has stated "building is not synonymous to content or, for that matter, culture."
Nathan Coley: Exhibition Space and Bodies as a Carnival
A museum is more than its architecture. Along with alternative exhibitionary spaces, museums have the potential to alter the ways in which the public perceives and makes use of its space. Nathan Coley's work engages some of the issues in the history of disciplinary order over the masses and the exhibitionary complex, and is worth considering here.
In its most banal interpretation, Gathering of Strangers, by Scottish artist Nathan Coley, is a trite observation of what an exhibition space really is - a corny caption accompanying bodies moving through the galleries. This is how I felt about this work the first time I encountered it at the Istanbul Biennal in fall 2013, as I stopped by it only long enough to snap a photo before feeling compelled to keep moving, lest I block other visitors from seeing the work or moving about in this space.
Since 2013 I've revisited Gathering of Strangers on several occasions because of the way this work acknowledges and has the potential to disrupt histories of space like those examined in Tony Bennett's work on the exhibitionary complex and Michel Foucault on disciplinary space. As installation art, this decontextualized text (and other works like it by Coley) engages with space to acquire a site-specific meaning.
Coley's text piece Gathering of Strangers oddly advertises the uncomfortable circumstances of an assembly of unrelated, unfamiliar people, implying a condition of contemporary global nomadicism. The multicoloured, fairground light bulbs evoke an amusement park attraction, yet the phrase they spell is a common idiom for Christian congregations or the church itself, presenting a modern-day conflict between carnival and Lent.
When placed in a gallery, Coley's work alludes to the history of museums and galleries as instruments of moral reform, separating the mixing of bodies in crowds into individuals and promoting a middle-class conduct in the working-class patrons with spaces where they could see and be seen by the public.
Several of Coley's other works draw upon this history of controlling crowds in exhibitionary spaces while referencing a religious theme. There Will Be No Miracles Here references a 17th century decree in Modseine, Haute-Savoie, that stated 'There will be no miracles here, by order of the King.' In this context, this decree had been issued as a means of controlling mass hysteria among peasants who were leaving the harvest uncollected in the fields.
A Place Beyond Belief was inspired by an account of a woman in New York City who had witnessed an act of kindness by a Sikh man who was treated with hostility following the 9/11 attacks. In that moment, she realized that for New York to recover they had to become 'a place beyond belief.'
This work takes on very different meanings depending on where it is exhibited. In an art gallery, the blank white walls might make viewers of this work recall that many such institutions are modernist secular spaces where the public comes for personal contemplation of art, not for religious congregation.
A Place Beyond Belief was also installed in Pristina, Kosovo, outside the ruins of the Serbian Orthodox Church - a lingering symbol of Muslim and ethnic Albanian oppression before Kosovan independence. Here, Coley's work stands, as Kosovan politician Petrit Selimi puts it, "as a testimony not to religious belief but the misuse of religious belief."
These three works by Coley recall their site-specific history, but also hint at the potential of these spaces. Returning back to Gathering of Strangers, this is actually a remarkable piece to have been included in the fall of 2013 Istanbul Biennial. The Biennial came after the wake of the summer Gezi Park protests in which activists, and anarchists flooded the park and streets of the modern downtown Taksim with some protesting the announced construction of a shopping mall and others inciting rioting and violence. The protests were heavily suppressed by the police.
Istanbul is a city with a long history of energized crowding. In 532 CE a chariot race at the Hippodrome in the Golden Horn turned into a massive riot, which razed large sections of the city.
In speaking to this history of crowding within Istanbul's city space, Gathering of Strangers is offering a commentary beyond the immediate vicinity of the decontextualized art gallery and responding to events that took place in public space. The question then is, can this work be read as a call to revolutionaries, or just a simple reminder of the power of the public undivided to reclaim civic space - both in the streets and parks, and in museums and galleries?
Coley, an artist who deliberately decentres himself from his work, likely has no intentions for the meaning of this work in this particular space. Even if Gathering of Strangers doesn't deliberately or directly suggest to some viewers the potential of visitors in exhibition spaces to overcome the disciplinary order of the exhibitionary complex (more about this in a future blog), its fairground and carnival-like lights help to connect it with Michel Foucault's fiction of the festival - the undisciplined mixing of bodies during events such as religious feast days or the plague.
However, the word "strangers" in the illuminated text connects this work to the modern experience of gallery-goers, as these individualized visitors are alienated from one another. This can be seen in my initial hesitation to spend any longer than I had to in order to observe Coley's work at the Biennial and snap a photo.
Alternative Exhibition Space
Following the potentials of exhibitionary space that Coley's works present, I want to take a moment to consider just what is museum or exhibition space and where it can be located. As I've suggested from my reading of Coley's work, the museum and its exhibition has the potential to go anywhere the public can: from traditional spaces of quiet galleries and churches, to alternative exhibition spaces on busy streets and in parks. During my museums class project with the Workers' History Museum, I had the opportunity to experiment with alternative exhibition spaces in commemorating the history of the Plant Bathhouse in a wrap-around sign for a Preston Street electrical box.
Alternative exhibition spaces, such as streets, offer the possibility to present on-site histories to the public while dealing with a different set of politics than in the gallery. Public museums are a product of the broader efforts by middle-class reformers' efforts to cultivate the masses into an educated citizenry, and public bathing houses were originally proposed with a similar goal in mind of promoting clean bodies, and by extension, good morals.
In using the street space, however, as an exhibitionary space, I had to contend not so much with the museum politics of 'cultivating a respectable citizenry,' but with urban planning that aims to keep everyone, whether in cars or on the sidewalk, moving along from point A to point B. As architectural history MA student Meredith Stewart has pointed out, the history of the Plant Bath is also tied to a social reform and urban planning movement from the early 20th century known as the City Beautiful movement.
The City Beautiful movement posited that beautiful and healthy cities "could promote moral regeneration, and proper urban planning could benefit the poor and working classes." Furthermore, such considerations of urban planning were thought to be essential to the formation of a sense of civic pride and community.
My newspaper and archival research found that the Plant Bath certainly was embraced as a community centre and was so beloved that it stayed open despite its poor financial revenue during tight economic times such as the Great Depression and the Second World War. When the Plant Bath deteriorated into such poor conditions it was closed for almost a decade, the community rallied again and succeeded in saving their baths because so many residents had memories of learning to swim at the baths and wanted their children to have a place that they could walk to for swimming lessons.
This reveals that the community felt a sense of ownership over the Plant Bath and recognition of it as a historical landmark for their community, and this helped keep the shell of the old baths in place as a community centre when the new pool was built on to this structure.
I designed the wrap for this electrical box with this public in mind - those residents and school groups that would be walking to use the baths and would encounter this street exhibition. As an exhibition space, the wrap-around and its images and text serve to disrupt the flow of pedestrian traffic outside the recreation centre, just long enough to catch their attention, help them to notice and think about the historic entrance with the engraving "Plant Bath" a few feet away, and hopefully to provoke memories from people of many different ages and communities of how they used the swimming baths.
In this case, using a street-side electrical box as an alternative exhibition space offers the possibility to disrupt the way people think about space - what is and isn't a museum or exhibition space - and the bathhouse as a place of collective memories and community pride.
Sources & Further Information:
Michel Foucault | Panopticism | Discipline and Punish
Tony Bennett | The Exhibitionary Complex | The Birth of the Museum. History, Theory, Politics
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