Farewell to Research, Welcome to Rescription

 

Rescription (noun)

the act of writing back; the answering of a letter

Origin: [L. rescriptio: cf. F. rescription. See Rescribe.]

When I became a research fellow, I think I spent the entire first year trying to understand what artistic research was. Nobody could explain it, really, even though we read articles about it and talked about it all the time. In the end, I just had to put it aside and do my art.

—Ane Hjort Guttu^[1]

Context and Anticipations: Rescriptions as Transpositions in Xeno-Spaces

Aware of the pitfalls of conspiracy theories and the political danger of being labelled “fake news”, “you” still have the right to think that “we” are living through a scenario that sees the instituting of a new cold war. This new cold war is established between, on the one hand, the world of businesses and entrepreneurial artistic actions, and, on the other hand, the world of reversed desire that seeks to imagine non-aligned life forms, ways of being that try to reorder an ever-more tragic and harmful reality. The never-ending capitalist “real”, with which we are compelled to interface, is sending us—mostly via the orchestration of panic through a weaponised mass media—legislative missives of (ill) intention on a daily basis. These letters of instruction delimit how we must play this game, requiring our compliance with ever-stranger and increasingly unacceptable rules. This “subsidiary cold war” that we must now fight, after the end of the “mainstream” Cold War, brings us to the surface of the world, to harvest those handfuls of resistance scattered across the earth, throwing them—as the work of art—directly in the face, stomach and liver of the cynical and the cruel, of the predatory leaders of the necropolitical.

One of the key questions, drawn from among many, is whether it is possible that “we” could write back to these regimes of neoliberalist authoritarian politics through the exhibition as a public letter. Due to the socio-politico-medical conditions that we experience nowadays, we can envisage, in a not-too-distant possible future, the development of a new scenario, an “exhibitionary turn”, which entails the practice of tele-exhibition, accessed through remote-but-immersive technologies, 3D panoramic virtual interactions, panning video shots and e-catalogues. In these conditions, the production of art will increasingly dematerialise and curatorial practice will emphasise the translating and mediating value of textual descriptive narrations. In this scenario of an exhibitionary turn, there will also be the possibility of the miniaturising of the exhibition, a proxy micro-exhibition to be purchased from the museum shop in the form of a box set of home-assembly pieces with instructions for the “participant-users.” A further developmental step could entail exhibition as product delivery, the pre-assembled exhibition kit transported directly to all those buildings with unused space, to occupy all those rooms that remain unrented due to the crisis in labour mobility.

As an alternative to this dystopic exhibitionary turn, other exhibitions will increasingly operate as manifestos announcing and declaring new and different societal conditions and wonders. This will not necessarily be seen as a return to avant-gardism or as an invocation of freedoms of expression, but rather as a turn towards that flashing moment of indignation, towards a rescriptive form of contestation beyond the aesthetic of art making and artist promotion. This exhibition-making will not primarily be understood in terms of a site of presentation of art as entertainment, but in terms of an elaboration of a discourse or affective space to transgress, to escape the conditions of display of art as a commercial good. In these conditions, the exhibition will no longer be perceived as a site, but rather as a contextual framework to mediate rescriptive content. This framework will facilitate a different usage of the exhibition, moving from the exhibition as a kind of third space for first encounters, a space that operates in the “in-between” of artistic-curatorial message and public response, to exhibition as a meta form of art.

“We” are exposed to a set of prescriptions by governments that play the role of doctor, pretending to take care of the public’s economic health by reciting what business, industry and finance script as priorities for the people: the necessity to protect the corporations, the sacralisation of investments and property ownership, the benefits of technological surveillance developments, the heroicising of the private sector and the apologia of entrepreneurship. In this scenario, nobody will tell “you” what drugs might interact with each other, or how the counter-indicated medicines might harm “you”. In this context, then, a rescription may be seen as a response to a prescription, an attempt to disobey, an attempt to refuse that which harms the body of the society in which “you” want to live. Concerning the signification of a rescription as a new “line of flight”, this could also be seen as a new mode of reform, a mode of reconsidering and resisting the actual conditions and expressions of hegemonic, accumulative and extractive powers.

The politics of rescription is not equivalent with the politics of resentment. It is true that rescription in an exhibitionary format—where an exhibition may be seen as a medium for an insurgent message—is a kind of counter-narrative that opposes itself to the grand narrative of economic growth and success, to the myths that perpetuate the capitalist status quo. However, a rescription should be autonomous in its construction and decolonial in its goals, rather than simply reactive, not simply a determined negation.

In terms of cultural economics, the greatest threat to the realisation of exhibition as rescriptive production nowadays is the increased power of white-collar lobbyists. These players influence legislative decisions to privilege business-oriented cultural managers, enabling them to have priority in accessing public funds. They create funding conditions to facilitate the production of exhibitions as displays of commodity artworks, devoid of discursive or critical apparatus, surfaces of delight that shine and sparkle with the joys of consumption. In recent decades, an academic-political opposition to such market-oriented art exhibitions has been instituted. This tendency advocated “artistic research” as a form of art making that could be exhibited with an interest in producing knowledge rather than in economic speculation.

The ascendance of “artistic research”, both in the academic milieu and in parts of the wider professional art world, had a twofold aspiration. On the one hand, this advocacy of research was used by bureaucrats to establish that art academies could be domesticated and aligned within the requirements of R&D policies and markets, used by managers in corporatised art institutions to generate auras of “value” attaching to their activities and productions, and so raise more funds. On the other hand, artistic research became—according to a quite different understanding—a political stance, perhaps even an oppositional ideology, that sought to criticise-by-practice the colonisation of academic work by marketing and creative industries discourses. Or, in a related manner, artistic research was approached as a matter of poesis, of world-making and as a field of transversal agency by artists involved in knowledge production and methodological experimentation, and by those engaged in political invention and communication at the intersections of singularity and multitude.

Artistic research at the beginning of the 2000s could be considered a kind of return, not necessarily as a historical reflex, but mostly as a reaffirmation of the complex political identities of art in the face of the perils of the mega-spectacularisation and hyper-marketisation of art—at “the end of art”. Tracing the arcs of artistic research from the Renaissance onwards, through the modern avant-gardes to the 1960s and 1970s conceptualist formations, “we” can readily perceive a succession of “research turns” continuing up to the current moment. Perhaps artistic movements are exposed to the effects of something akin to the laws of thermodynamics, and the transfer of creative and critical energies from one system to another in all periods. It is possible that “we” will soon reach a plateau, a point of overheating and energy saturation, in the utopian discourse of artistic research as an industrious hybrid—organic-machinic—production of emancipatory knowledge. Even if, today, “we” register “research” as an overused and as a misused term. Even as “we” become aware of its imminent decadence, at least in the accelerated art field, “we” can also anticipate a more convincing return of research in a counter-factual future.

If “artistic research” tends to enter the standard entropic cycle of any kind of historical art tendency, then it simply remains to be seen whether or not artists and curators will replace or improve the practice of research with the practice of rescription. If this is the case, then these artists and curators could take on the task to test the replacement of exhibition by transposition. They could perhaps start from the premise that rescription should replace the fetishism of research in producing art. Rescription is post-methodological and post-capitalist in its nature. Rescription discloses, both politically and artistically, a new world.

Critics might respond to these claims by noting that if you want to propose a rescription, you will need a wall. In this near future, a wall in an exhibition will have already been transformed in its nature and function. In this imagined time to come, the wall will no longer be a distant framing device, a contemplative surface, a structural piece of architecture, but rather will have become a data space, an interactive screen for browsing multimedia hypertextual information. However, transposition is more than this. It is simultaneously presentation and production of rescriptive content related to multiple spaces and variable temporalities and addressed to multiple publics.

A transposition—as a trans[ex]position—could be understood as a heterotopic and a heterochronic event—an apparition in certain spaces at certain times—that would intervene in a specific routine of different states of viewing, surprising people in unexpected situations. There are different kinds of transpositions, from interventions based on hacking to complex installations based on research. For example, in a simple kind of transpositional event, someone could transmit a short video message as an artwork, simultaneous or at different hours in a day or over several days, in the middle of a film screening in a mainstream cinema, on a scoreboard during a football match, in a televised interruption to a talk-show debate, in an alert notification on a smartphone, on the timetable in a railway station or airport, on the monitor of an ATM, on an electronic street sign or billboard, on the personal computer of an outsourced a worker employed in a corporate office, on another exhibition installed anywhere in the world.

Another kind of transposition will make use of objects and media displayed in different places with a greater connection and anchorage to their particular site of display than they have to each other. Someone might organise a mock opening with different people transmitting live from each site, like in an external television broadcast across distributed locations. More sophisticated transpositions will make use of the outputs of different practices of research. Such practices of research will not be based upon the established academic paradigm of approaching a subject matter through a scientific model or through the identification of a thematic focus, the application of a methodology, the construction of a context of action and communication and the production of research results and outputs. Rather, complex transposition would make use of research from diverse fields such as affect theory, Bildwissenschaft, Object-Oriented Ontologies, science studies, neuroscience, neurolinguistics, bioengineering, relational geography, citizen journalism, necropolitics or thanaticism, decolonial thinking and practices, accelerationism, altermodernity, metamodernity, transitionalism, recessionalism, compositionalism, assemblism, commonalism, militantism, and so on.

In a transposition there is no hierarchy of primary or secondary events. There is no thought of a “parenthetical communion”, as Jean-Paul Martinon describes the discursive events associated with an exhibition,^[2] nor of the “paracuratorial”, as Jens Hoffmann designates the lectures, screenings and conversations between curators and artists, proposed as side events in a secondary relation to the craft of exhibition-making and its primacy as social ritual and theatrical experience.^[3] An exhibition need no longer be confined in a container—a white cube, a black box, a grey space or a studio or a hangar/shed or an ex-industrial space—but could be expanded in asymmetrical contexts and dispersed across enduring moments or fleeting instants of ferocious and unforgettable times.

As a new regime of exhibition, the transposition will make use of xeno-practices, redefining spaces of perception as xeno-spaces—as non-familiar spaces of thought. In transposition, being a meta-event, “we” will experience a mix of co-generative spaces, producing new—mental/affective/sensorial/political—spaces in the molecular xeno-encountering between artists, curators and publics. “Xeno-” is proposed as a curatorial methodology by Armen Avanessian and Markus Miessen.^[4] In his contribution to the book Perhaps It is Time for a Xeno-Architecture to Match (2018), Avanessian approaches the “xeno-“ as a desire to become a stranger to oneself and others.^[5] There is furthermore an “unknown outside”, which is experienced through the impure reason of the “xeno-“ where speculation takes the place of contemplation. This change is happening not only in the future but also in the past.^[6] A xeno-practice in making an experimental exhibition is based on a “thinking-by-doing” process, proposing alienation as a challenge for an unknown audience.^[7] This kind of xeno-methodology—similar to the Dadaist approach proposed by Paul K. Feyerabend—implies the transformation of someone into a xeno-one, based on exploring the capacity to become other, whether human or non-human. In an exhibition narrative, this “other” can be a human victim of neo-fascist violence, or a non-human “co-lateral” loss—such as de-forestation, species extinction, ocean acidification, geological catastrophe—generated by ecological disaster driven by capitalist “growth”. Contesting these situations by exposing atrocities to re-imagining and to our capacity to take action in response, it is thus possible to conceive of a progressive xeno-politics, as coined by Avanessian.^[8] Such a progressive xeno-politics should be able to respond to the widespread re-nationalisation, or re-territorialisation in response to globalisation that facilitates neo-fascism, and to respond to the ecological and environmental destruction perpetuated by the greed of neoliberal regimes of extraction and accumulation. Working with a speculative temporality, a presumption that time comes from the future, a transposition understood as a complex of xeno-practices is already possible through rescriptive invocation.

Exhibition as Poetics

According to a common approach and understanding, for an exhibition to be studied from the perspective of a poetics requires that its (visual-textual) discourse be understood to comprise poetic utterance and operations of metonymy. However, epistemologically speaking, a poetics refers to a set of rules to structure an object of study. In our case, approaching the exhibition as a matter of poetics may be accomplished through the construction of such rules for the exhibition that have to be recognised, but that are exposed to the possibility of being radically broken. The golden rule of a poetics of exhibition would then be that “[a]ll the stipulated rules in the making of an exhibition may be superseded by the free, emancipated imagination of an agent who is self-responsible and self-organized in their capacity to conceive, produce and mediate the exhibition.”^[9] If a contemporary Aristotle sought to write a Treatise of Exhibition Poetics now, he might think twice before trying to rehearse the section on the precious Comedy of Exhibition Practice, while some art world hacks could be especially keen to erase the infamous section on the Tragedy of Exhibition Trials. One could go further, and note that gnoseologically speaking, the poetics of exhibition may be perceived as a field, or a system of forms and principles that are characteristic for a certain social group that seeks to differentiate itself from surrounding hegemonic social norms, a social group that seeks to produce itself as exceptional, a matter of distinction. The transgression of the rules of exhibition becomes the engine of production—the “poetic” action becomes the energetic input—to make the exhibition machine work and communicate a meaning of disruption and exception.

In our different contemporaneities, an exhibition should not necessarily be about art—already so compromised within the bourgeois economics of creativity—but rather about urgencies. An exhibition is not necessarily conceived to be directly about beauty, grace, humour, but rather could be about injustice, violence, precarity and so on. Even if an exhibition is constructed in a specific space of a gallery, museum, derelict industrial or kitschy commercial building, it can be expanded through the additional spaces of the media in which the exhibitionary message is assembled. The visitor or participant can simultaneously walk around in the physical space of exhibition and wander through those other, extended and reproduced spaces of “nature”, “suburb”, “underworlds”. Art as politics and exhibitions as assemblies, gatherings or parliaments may become tools for operating in an expanding field of counter-meanings.

The question why the exhibition is seen as an appropriate or relevant medium for the expression of political dissensus is often posed. Common responses include, first, that because an exhibition is a public place, functioning like a simulated public square, as a public sphere, it facilitates the gathering of the multitude in a shared free space. Second, it seems that for some the exhibition has the inherent power to operate as a heterotopic dispositive, reproducing different situations, mobilising documentary and evidentiary material experienced through shifting perspectives. Third, because the exhibition is a mode of discursive broadcasting that can reach a wider and somewhat unpredictable audience(s), it has a specific political affordance. Finally, it can be argued that an exhibition has an imaginative dimension that can transpose political issues in a poetical language and in a register of affect. Historically, the exhibition has amply demonstrated that it has transformative powers that exceed the function of merely displaying contemporary art. Exhibition is a means that continues to be used to disclose everything from contested political discourses to various scientific and technological discoveries. Today, socially engaged and ecologically oriented curatorial practices are involved in discussing the public impact of different forms of work exploitation, income inequalities, effects of precarity, migration, climate change and other related urgencies.

Other issues to take into consideration when approaching the question of exhibition as a poetics are the contexts of its construction, the formats of representation and the changing status of curatorial work. Concerning the context of its construction, some positions imply that the poetics of an exhibition should be constructed more from the perspective of a disinterested scientific endeavour rather than from the logic of profitability. In regards its relevance as a format, in one of his interviews Philippe Parreno asked the audience to “think of the exhibition in terms not of forms or objects, but of formats: formats of representation, for interpreting the world.”^[10] Finally, then, related to the changing status of curating, to understand an exhibition from the perspective of poetics might raise the question as to whether there is a need, or just a desire, for the curator to express uniqueness and authenticity from their position as auteur. Increasingly we see the expression of multiple and unstable professional identities. If, in a first wave of “curator-artists” appearing in the 1970s, and again in a second wave appearing in the 1990s, the curator assumed the social role of the artist, then we see this triggering the reverse move in the 2010s, whereby the artist plays the role of the curator. Over the last decade, there have been more and more experimental situations in which artists such as DIS Collective (9th Berlin Biennale), Raqs Media Collective (Shanghai Biennial), Christian Jankowski (11th edition of Manifesta), Elmgreen and Dragset (Istanbul Biennial), Thomas Demand and Goshka Macuga (Fondazione Prada in Milan), ruangrupa (documenta 15, 2022) have taken on the position of curator and play the decisive creative role in conceiving, installing and mediating exhibitions.

Exhibition as Genre

It seems that “we” are always caught “in-between”, in a kind of interlude, as suggested by Hal Foster, stuck in a never-ending transition where we anticipate our practices as endangered and our historical conditions of experience as subject to radical change.^[11] One of the more unsettling expectations emerging from the pandemic is that we will now be exposed to new models of exhibition-making and showing. One such possible new model is the exhibition-without-public—without visiting, gathering, attendance—in which curators, artists and technicians just install the works in the space and then an educator makes a video-tour presenting the exhibition. Another such model is the exhibition-without-installation in which an institution is simply presenting artworks online that were supposed to be installed in a physical space , facilitating alongside this a talk about variations within the artwork’s relations. A third model is that of the cyber-exhibitions, a model which is informed by the subsidiary ideology of innovative technologies—augmented, immersive and interactive digital media—that will serve to the advancement, perhaps even acceleration, of capitalism. With this third model of exhibition as a genre “we” are entering in a phase of “medium critique”—a kind of “post-institutional critique”—questioning the eco-political circumstances of exhibiting in a privileged space of interactions and time-consumption. This might be the ultimate cynical playful intervention of the digital curator. This is a kind of supra-scription (an erasure) whereby the place of work is no longer in the factory of the exhibition space, but rather locked within the non-space, the invisible space, of homeworking.

Conventionally, to establish something as a genre entails identifying conventions, regular arrangements of structural and semiotic elements that constitute both a typical object of attention and a typical mode of attending upon that object. In its role as the structuring context of a communicative event, the exhibition may be perceived as a genre constructed according to a set of purposes and embedding discourses from other domains—politics, ecology, philosophy, forensic practices, etc.—in the service of those purposes. Alternatively, in thinking the exhibition as a genre, we can imagine an exhibitionary Bildung, which implies a progressive formation, a process of edification. This kind of processual Bildung, understood as formation through education, aiming at a consistent transformation, is effectively a matter of editing—and, in some situations, is rescripting—the infrastructure, the structure and the superstructure of the exhibition.

“We” can better understand the concept of exhibitionary Bildung as a genre if “we” take into consideration that not only the curator is shaping an exhibition, but that an exhibition can also influence the agency of a curator—based on the explanatory model of Actor-Network Theory as developed by Bruno Latour^[12]—engaged in a network of permissions, interdictions and obstructions—and here I can also recommend the Danish documentary/experimental film The Five Obstructions (2003), directed by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth—the curator is always informed by the changing relations within the space, matter, light, props and tools of the exhibition. This is not implying that “we” will be in the position to think of the exhibition as being a non-human living organism, but at least as a kind of “vibrant matter”, as Jane Bennett put it.^[13] Following a different train of thought, “we” can observe how, in the post-white-cube age of exhibition productions and histories—there is another discussion to be had as to why not every exhibition is historicised—discursive artworks may be influenced by the character of the spaces in which they are exhibited or performed. In this situation, the conventional specificity of an exhibition installed in an institutional space that makes use of a kind of “genre knowledge” that is part of generic practices of exhibition, could be subverted through a critical production of site-specificity, context-specificity or research-specificity of an exhibition. An activist exhibition can, for example, expand genre or subgenre categories through the production of radical knowledge.

Exhibition as Apparatus

To reflect on the nature of exhibition as apparatus, then, “we” have to focus on the heterotopical and multiple identities of the exhibition as a theatre of unnecessary spectacle, as an open walking landscape, as a closed artificial human park, as a hospice, a circus, a filmset, an echo chamber and so forth. In each of these multiple appearances and spatial rhetorics, the exhibition functions as an apparatus of interpellation. If “we” have to catch up with the concept of apparatus, proposed by Michel Foucault in his archaeological archival investigations of different historical regimes of expressions of power, I refer to the common interpretations by Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben.

Deleuze’s interpretation of the apparatus as a dispositif is more abstract and poetic, presenting it as a bifurcation of vectors and derivations exposed to seismic thinking that would produce lines of sedimentations, but also fractures that will draw a map as a “field work”.^[14] As such, an exhibition could be seen as a cartographic field that can be traversed following the light of the lines of visibility, the enunciations of the lines of utterance, the arrows of the lines of force—that are mixing words and things—and the processes of the lines of subjectivation which will result in lines of flight. Deleuze introduces a possibility of flight through a fracture in the process of catching the subject in a form of subjectivation. At the margin of the map, there is always a possibility of escaping from the disciplinary focus of an apparatus through “lines of cracking, breaking and rupture”, however, there is the inescapability of entering in a process of becoming-other, part of a new, more current, controlling apparatus.^[15] As a subject visiting an exhibition, you have the power to delimit yourself through the diagnosis of the material you see, but you will also always operate in the entangled lines of a new apparatus.

On the other hand, according to Giorgio Agamben, Foucault sees the apparatus as a strategic formation that is responding to an urgency, able to manipulate relations of forces but conditioned by limits of knowledge. The function of the apparatus, in its process of subjectification, is to produce a subject according to a system of beliefs and norms with the intention to capture, determine, manage, control, govern, model and orient the subject’s behaviours, gestures, opinions and thoughts.^[16] Accordingly, in an exhibition, a spectator or participant is exposed to a discourse of subjectification through a process of de-subjectification. From this position of a negative understanding of apparatus as a modelling machine, Agamben is proposing a desecration of the apparatus, a kind of restitution to common use of what has been captured through the functioning of the apparatus. Here the contradiction in which an exhibition is situated is apparent: on the one hand, an “exhibition as apparatus” is trying to create a kind of dispositio for the viewer to be captured in a discursive framework that provides a critical meaning and challenge to prior forms of subjectification, constructed through exposing the subject to different kind of political apparatuses of control. However, on the other hand, an exhibition might easily be described negatively as a controlling machine, even though it declares purposes of emancipation or claims for justice.

There are different cultures of exhibition, even of exhibition as apparatus. There are, for example, exhibitions interested in the global distribution of messages, in advertising artists as brands and artworks as commodities. There are also exhibitions interested in the localisation of problems and opening up discussion within a clearly located community. Aside from the growing global trend to produce the exhibition as a tourist destination and festival, at a local scale the exhibition may still function as a laboratory for testing reactions and producing accounts that improve understanding of specificities. In trying to interrogate, from the perspective of a hermeneutics of suspicion, the functions of an exhibition, “we” can work with complex rhetorical apparatuses, asking “if curating is a culture of care is this in contradiction with the idea that an exhibition is an interpellation of the audience, seeking to induce a concern for a social problem in a manner similar to marketing practices that create new consumption needs for a new experiential product or service?” Or, “we” can work with simple pragmatic assumptions, and ask “is an exhibition a caring service that has no insidious intention to control the affective implications of such an encounter?” A lot of questions can be raised in this way when we approach exhibition through the suspicion of its role as apparatus. Aside from the critique of the infamous cultural industry, there is the claim for an activist/militant curating that operates through subversions, disruptions and interventions. However, in some situations, modes of display inspired from this genre of activist/militant curating may be seen simply as forms of spectacle without entertainment.

In most cases, the status of an exhibition can be determined by reading the assumed identity of the artists: entrepreneurial, activist, cultural worker or some other such designation. In this situation, you can also evaluate the nature of the exhibitionary apparatus involved in challenging the subjectivity of the participants. In each of these situations, if the exhibition is used as a medium for setting up a hegemonic position, as is the case with exhibitions that valorise national or religious identities and other conservative values, the exhibition remains a medium of learning, for the curators and artists and for the audience. So, when a curator curates an exhibition, they engage in a process of research in close relation with the narrative world of an artist or the cinematic galaxy of the artists they work with. Furthermore, when a visitor enters an exhibition, they are entering into an open framework of self-education, discovering things that could contribute to an existential illumination or social attunement. In an exhibition, you can learn about the necessity of the redistribution of time or about the harsh experience of labour, but also about the instances of celebrated popularity or the intricacy of the “populist moment”.

In focusing on audience Bildung, “we” just hope to reach the end of the quantification of audience, attributing greater value to a walking subjectivity attending an exhibition on their own and learning how to be engaged in a compositionist conversation.^[17] In that case, an exhibitionary Bildung may refer to the collective effects of self-formation based on experiences of exhibition visits and encounters that would influence further intersectional learning within society. When visiting an exhibition, someone is in the first instance alone, present with themself, connecting from different positions to new challenges of harmonisation. Encountering new works and people, an existentialist experience unfolds that may culminate in new cognitive and affective formations that can influence not only beliefs, but also behaviours. In the second instance, the visitor is placed in a continuous interaction with new knowledge, with new understandings, and will try to recalibrate and find the proper frequency that allows for communication, finding the most inclusive common grounds for the necessary transformations in a perpetually changing society. In a process of cognitive, moral and emotional maturation, by taking up an autonomous but multi-perspectival position, the visitor may become more engaged, more informed and more experienced in drawing a complex construction of a society for all. Bildung is more.

Talking about the curator’s Bildung, in the endeavour to conceive an exhibition that could produce knowledge as well as conditions for participation and feedback, the curator can define a position in the content that can make transparent, for example, the ideological differences between cooperative and corporative exhibition-making. In current curatorial practices, there should be a continuous emancipation from the rules of exhibition production in terms of “curatorial correctness”, as provided by the marketing ideology of the cultural institutions shaped in the private business sector. Curating should not be about collecting artists and speculation, but more about generating a common thematic reflection on progressive social issues. In the end, “we” can think about the exhibition as an apparatus for normalising market interests or as an apparatus for criticising and overcoming the hegemonic consensus of integrating art within consumerist circuits.

Conclusions

The exhibition as poetics is engaged in the field of language; the exhibition as genre is signalling itself in the form of information; the exhibition as apparatus is operational in the intricate domain of ideology. As a poetics, the exhibition can be approached from the stratosphere of interpretation, eager to explain, in the formats of analysis, the condition of our explorative understanding of the artworks. As a genre, the exhibition can be studied from the perspective of morphology in an attempt to structure the information in temporary systems of relative knowledge. As an apparatus, the exhibition can be viewed and reviewed through the calibrated filters of biopolitics or necropolitics that can reveal the ideological material used in the enactment of control.

If “we” think that curating should be approached as a transversal practice, then “we” can imagine that the production of exhibition would be based on the interpretation/translation of languages, on a specific arrangement of information, and on the calibration of the ideological apparatus. Even before 2020, many already argued that the exhibition was on the verge of dying, evidenced through the claims that fewer and fewer people were attending exhibition gatherings. So perhaps now we are in a situation to reflect on the untimeliness of exhibition’s obituary, just as we have previously seen in the case of cinema’s purported demise. In spite of these apocalyptic forecasts, “we”’ don’t need to attend any funeral just yet, especially with respect to the cultural life of exhibition. Rather, “we” may be busily occupied in the birth (or return?) of a paradigm of the exhibition as an abstracted space of encounters without commercial interest. “We” are still in the situation to assist or to produce the emergence of new principles of installation for new regimes of exhibition design. Even in these new regimes, the exhibition as discourse will demonstrate its potentiality of agitating the informational flow of knowledge formation. If “we” still conceive of knowledge as a building, then “we” either put it in danger of falling into ruin, or we present it as a solid construction that can survive. If “we” conceive knowledge as a flow, circulating through rhizomatic or radicant self-generated circuits, then “we” will have to learn—to edify ourselves—how to navigate through stormy conditions. Beyond the actual condition of the precarity and austerity of exhibition-making, even beyond the privilege to make a Gedankenausstellung (a thought-exhibition), beyond the frameworks of institutional activism, neo-institutionalism, or even non-institutional exhibition practices, the critical view on exhibition has been to denounce its interpellative, deceptive and interceptive strategical construction.

Not as negation, but rather having a more autonomous status, rescription as a way of making art and exhibitions (transpositions) could be perceived as partly agitational, partly engaged in claiming the rights to reconstruction, and partly exploring the potentialities of imagination—an open-ended form of exploration, and not a colonial-exploitative-extractivist-accumulative form of exploration. By contesting and countering the way the world is stuck in the capitalist mode of reproduction, stuck within the horizon of capitalist “realism”, rather than proposing a redistribution of resources, power, and privileges within the neoliberal horizon, rescription would not only deconstruct the status quo of contemporary belief, but would also generate a more inclusive world of world-makers.