Redefining the Exhibition

Introduction

Paintings, sculptures and other works of art existed for thousands of years without a single exhibition taking place. This feels odd, perhaps, insofar as the visuality of the visual arts seems to the modern public of art to provide an ontological necessity for such objects to be exhibited. For instance, early on in his book The Story of Exhibitions (1951), Kenneth Luckhurst states that “[p]ictures, and other works of ‘fine’ art, only completely serve their proper purpose when some person is looking at them, or, to put it the other way round, when they are being exhibited.”^[1] Since art exhibitions were almost unheard of before the seventeenth century, we might modify Luckhurst’s assertion as an enquiry. When, why, and under what specific conditions, did works of art come to be the kinds of things that are exhibited? Or, how did exhibitionary practices emerge as possible, suitable or exemplary destinations for artworks?

Caroline Jones argues that there is “no plausible history of ‘exhibitions’ that originates outside of Western capitalism”.^[2] It is vitally important to begin an investigation into the definition and redefinition of the art exhibition by locating it within the historical, geographical and political conditions that encouraged its formation, but I want to turn Jones’s assertion into a question to avoid the false impression that the exhibition by definition corresponds to capitalist social relations and is best understood as an expression of them. What exactly is the relationship between the exhibition format and capitalism or the West? In what ways is the art exhibition historically tied to the rise of shop window displays or the public displays of artefacts in museums? Readers of Michel Foucault’s essay on “heterotopia” may have an answer to these questions ready to hand—the exhibition is a device of modern governance that, for instance, pacifies the crowd—but I want to attempt a redefinition of the exhibition that pays more attention to art’s changing and contested social relations of production, so that the actual and plausible history of exhibitions is laced with potential and haunted by suppressed and buried histories.^[3]

My purpose is not to focus on the economics of the exhibition, but to explain the persistence of the exhibition and its continued viability—and its possibilities and limitations—by understanding the specific social relations assumed or constituted by the exhibition. The point is to focus the enquiry on the agents of historical change in the emergence of the exhibition in the history of art, and what the material circumstances are, including crises and opportunities, that give them the perception that their actions make sense. Do we need an exhibitionary undercommons, with its strategies of stealthy occupation?^[4] Does this see the exhibition from the perspective of the margins of the public?

Art is a field characterised by differentiation, contestation, division and struggle, over what art is or can be as well as over what the world is or can be, but the exhibition is a format that is deployed across art’s entire field—from the centre to all the peripheries, from the state apparatuses to the infrastructures of dissent, and from decor for the super-wealthy to the provision of art for the alleged benefit of the impoverished and abandoned. The exhibition is political in three distinct but related ways. First, it is a social form that has its own political character. Second, it is a site for political struggle. And third, it is a platform for the presentation of political material. The exhibition form is complicit in art’s embrace with power and the state (white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, class distinction, ableism, etc.) and yet, in addition to the politics of the exhibition, we need an analysis of the exhibition as social form. That is to say, we need to ask what the specific social relations concretised by the exhibition are, and what technological and material forces are deployed in its functions. This enquiry locates the exhibition within art as a mode of production distinct from, but subordinate to the capitalist mode of production.

My argument is not that the exhibition should be thought of as an act of labour, but that the art exhibition arises historically out of a revolution that liberated artists from art’s prior social relations of production. In other words, I am calling for a redefinition of the exhibition that is based on locating it historically not only within the transition from feudalism to capitalism, as an example of the commodification of art within the shift from patronage to the art market, but more importantly within the long historical campaign to elevate art as a scholarly activity above both handicraft and industry.^[5] It must be recognised that this history is shaped by the history of European imperial expansion, and that certain aspects of the colonial project are fulfilled with the invention of the form of the exhibition and the Western European invention of art as a universal category of high culture. But another strand needs to be woven into the historical cloth. A more nuanced picture emerges by reconstructing the meaning of historical struggles played out through distinctions between slaves, wage labourers, artisans, intellectuals and artists. Paying attention to these questions helps to renarrativise the birth of art and the invention of the exhibition as disputes over work at a time of crisis when the institutions and organisations of capitalist hegemony were not yet fully formed.

An exhibition can take almost any form, and any theoretical restriction on what the exhibition consists of will almost certainly be disproved in practice by artists and curators expanding the possibilities of the exhibition as medium. The category of the exhibition can be further stretched to cover practices of display prior to the use of the word “exhibition”, which was introduced to name a specific historically unusual form of display at the end of the eighteenth century. In retrospect, the exhibition of works of art can be detected in practices of display prior to the formalised organisation of the first consciously staged exhibitions. The pre-history of the exhibition is not to be dismissed as outside the field of enquiry, as not exhibitions in the full sense of the word, but are to be understood as indicative of a condition for art in which various practices of display were subordinated to other dominant modes of circulation. This is why the purpose of my inquiry is not to describe the features of the exhibition and then track down examples that resemble it, which therefore stand as origins or precursors of it. For most of the history of art, exhibitions were unheard of, so when works of art are put on display in the window of an artisan’s workshop or in the reception room of a palace or shown to the public in a marketplace for sale, for instance, we need to be able to see how these types of display did not immediately bring about the universalisation of the art exhibition and to understand what prevented this from happening. The aim of this short study, therefore, is to reconstruct an image of the structural changes to art that were active in shifting the role of the art exhibition from being rare, marginal, itinerant and unformed to being a principal feature of art’s mode of operation.

If the first Salon of the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris was, in some sense, the first exhibition of works of art, then the invention of the exhibition precedes the birth of the museum, gallery, art’s public and the art market, since it took place in 1667, albeit nearly twenty years after the academy was established.^[6] However, this event is not the only candidate for the first exhibition. Jacques-Louis David, for instance, who had participated in numerous Salons, announced in 1794 that he would introduce the practice of the “exhibition” into France, stating: “The painter’s practice of exhibiting his works to the eyes of his fellow citizens, in return for individual remunerations, is… observed in England, where it is called exhibition.”^[7]

This anecdotal reference to the use of the word exhibition—which belongs to a wider context in which the French word “exposition” was often contrasted with the English word “exhibition” and both might be differentiated from the word “display”—demands a comment about definitions.^[8] As important as it is to retrace the changing denotations and connotations of words such as exposition and exhibition as they played against each other in the nineteenth century, the definition of the exhibition is determined principally by practices and the social relations they assume or modify. Changes in the meanings of words often indicate the real social changes that are taking place, but it is on the latter that the investigation must focus. With this in mind, therefore, we can say that the definition and redefinition of the exhibition occurs principally not through shifts in language use but through the transformation of a matrix of practices and institutions.

A history of exhibitions that pays attention only to exhibitions is not a history at all. Exhibitions themselves, like the artworks that they contain, do not provide the evidence of the social forces at play within them. The art exhibition is an aggregation of different practices, legacies and struggles that have merged into what seems to be a single slightly vague unit. My renarrativisation of the historical formation of the exhibition as a social form calls for a painstaking investigation of the archival evidence, which I cannot even hope to fulfil in this paper. Although the historical terrain has been covered many times across various disciplines, the precise question of the formation of the exhibition has not been studied adequately. This is partly because the field has been divided into smaller fractions determined by periodisation and specialisation. This means there are case studies of individual artists (e.g. Whistler, Courbet, Blake, David) or of individual museums (e.g. the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture,^[9] the Louvre,^[10] the Royal Academy London,^[11] the Museum of Modern Art New York^[12]), and studies of various types of group exhibition^[13] or the solo exhibition specifically,^[14] but no general account of the history of exhibitions into which such case studies might be located.^[15] Perhaps the idea is that an accumulation of case studies will eventually provide enough material to form a general map in the future, but we are a long way from that today.

So, instead of amassing all the empirical data we need to provide a complete history of the exhibition, I will formulate a definition of the exhibition as it changes historically, redefining itself in response to catastrophes and crises that befall the established methods and systems of organising the production and circulation of artworks. I will attempt to understand the significance of the rise of the exhibition as art’s dominant form of encounter, by investigating the social preconditions for the exhibition in the changing relations of artistic production and reception. This kind of study needs to be guided by a theory of history. In place of a linear sequence of the invention of the exhibition and its subsequent roll out across art’s institutions, I locate the exhibition within a contested field, which not only results in the ebb and flow of legitimacy of the exhibition, but which also changes both the significance and the form of the exhibition. I take this model of history from Walter Benjamin.

Benjamin’s History of the Exhibition

Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” contains the following argument: “technological reproducibility emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual” and therefore brings about a shift from art’s “cult-value” to its “exhibition-value”. ^[16] This is an important milestone in the history of the discourse on exhibitions, as is recognised by its place at the head of Lucy Steeds’ anthology.^[17] I want to take two lessons from it. First, this essay located the emergence of the exhibition within a history of changing and contested economic, social and cultural systems. Second, Benjamin linked the rise of the exhibition to the politics of myth. So, before examining Benjamin’s specific history of the exhibition, I want to unpack the theory of history and myth in which this reference to exhibition-value is placed. We get some idea when Benjamin posits in his theses on history that “[t]he current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.” In reply, Benjamin opposes the writing of history as “a chain of events” with the perception of “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage”, which he ascribes to the “angel of history”. ^[18]

His writings on history are always structured around the anticipation of a new situation being possible at any point in time. This is not simply a revolutionary attitude to history. It is the result of viewing historical circumstances from the perspective of the wretched. Benjamin writes in bold strokes, not naturalistic detail, as he lays out the floor plan of a theory of art in which its main architectural features are indicated without filling in the gaps between them. This means he presents us with graphic contrasts that correspond with the extremes of the territory he is mapping. Benjamin longed for a revolution in art’s social relations that never transpired, or at least not fully or not as promised. He plots a new course for art along several routes, or along a single route with several interchangeable names. The social function of art is revolutionised, Benjamin said, when instead of being founded on ritual it is based on politics. And, the passage from ritual to politics is also described as the substitution of cult-value with exhibition-value, or the abolition of authenticity and the aura of the artwork with the unlimited edition and spatial dispersal of the mechanically reproduced image. Like Jevon’s concept of the “multiplication of utility”—which is realised, for instance, when a library purchasing a book for all its members in comparison with the purchase of a book by a single household—Benjamin’s concept of exhibition-value was introduced to recognise a hidden benefit that results from a crisis in the valorisation of culture.^[19]

Benjamin reflects on history through a conceptual framework that interweaves class struggle, progress, revolution, Technik and the new with angels, messianism, aura, mysticism, myth, catastrophe and redemption. In the words of Irving Wolfarth, “as Benjamin’s thinking evolves, theology and historical materialism wax and wane in inverse proportions.”^[20] So, Benjamin constructs paths through history that are based in the real material developments of apparatuses, procedures, institutions and techniques, and yet the chief characteristic of his theory of history is not that it is fixed in its materiality, but always open to change. This theory of history has two sides: the first is best described by Esther Leslie when she posits that “Benjamin hopes to relate history in ways that do not reinforce the sense that such history as has happened was inevitable. He wants to suggest that the rulers who have ruled need not always rule. It need not go on like this.”^[21] And the second, which internalises this openness and uncertainty into the writing of history itself, is described best by Wolfarth in a memorable phrase when he outlines that for Benjamin history is always written from the perspective of “the historian’s endangered present”.^[22]

Gillian Rose summarises Benjamin’s theory of history in the image of the Messiah. “This is what the Messiah means: the conception of the present not as homogeneous, empty time but as the ‘time of the now’; the past is referred to redemption, to a unique not an eternal image of the past, ‘a constellation’ with the present, both ‘shot through with chips of Messianic time’.”^[23] Theodor Adorno inverts the image of Benjamin’s philosophy of history into a historically infused conception of philosophy, stating that Benjamin’s philosophy “condenses into experience so that it may have hope. But hope appears only in fragmented form. Benjamin overexposes the objects for the sake of the hidden contours which one day, in the state of reconciliation, will become evident, but in so doing he reveals the chasm separating that day and life as it is.”^[24] Theology is not merely a vocabulary for Benjamin’s version of historical materialism. Redemption is not code for communism, for instance. As Norbert Bolz and Willem van Reijen put it, “Benjamin uses techniques evolved from the allegorical exegesis of the Bible” as a method for recognising the contingency in everything that appears to be fixed and to reorient history towards the dreams of the vanquished.^[25]

In a psychoanalytical register, according to Bolz and Van Reijen, “Benjamin views himself as a political dream-interpreter of history”.^[26] History, therefore, in Benjamin’s writing does not consist of assembling facts in the narrative explanation of events, but of the labour of recovering lost possibilities. Bolz and Van Reijen explain this notion through the example of Benjamin’s study of the Paris shopping arcades of the nineteenth century. “His Arcades Project is a journey through the physical inner world of the masses, who are asleep, and whose feelings are expressed in code through the dream-language of fashion, advertising, and architecture.”^[27] Esther Leslie gives the same point an expressly political character, interpreting Benjamin’s statement “[t]he past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption” as meaning that “for a Benjaminian Marxist, there is no point in viewing the past… unless it is from the perspective of lost opportunities, now potentially viable. For Benjamin, the costly task of the historical materialist is to redeem the past, make clear and put aright past oppressions, in order to set the record straight.”^[28]

Three versions and two translations of the essay were published between 1935 and 1939. It consists of fifteen numbered sections or parts, plus a preface and afterword. Read like a string of separate but related episodes, each part presents a different line of enquiry, and the beginning of each part seems like going back to the beginning of the whole thing again. The essay is organised around a history of art’s modes of reception. The earliest social function for art he argues, following Hegel, is a mode of reception in which works of art were experienced in social practices of worship. Reception, in this mode, has a cult-value, he contends. Benjamin mentions two other modes of reception for art, one which has exhibition-value and the other in which art becomes political. The historical passage from one mode of reception to another is not presented in a linear relationship that contrasts an obsolete form and modern form, but brings about, Benjamin observes, an “oscillation” between them. Exhibition-value precedes the rise of the technological reproducibility of works of art, but it is clear that the possibility of printing large volumes of images of works of art is incompatible with their cult-value and inflates their exhibition-value.

In a letter that Adorno sent to Benjamin in 1936, the essay is described as an “extraordinary study”. Adorno summarises the entire project as a revolutionary theory of history applied to the case of art. “My ardent interest and my complete approval attach to that aspect of your study which appears to me to carry out your original intention—the dialectical construction of the relationship between myth and history—within the intellectual field of the materialistic dialectic: namely, the dialectical self-dissolution of myth, which is here viewed as the disenchantment of art.”^[29] Likewise, Andrew Arato summarises the project of the essay by explaining that the “theory of the decline of the aura is a specific use of Weber’s category of Entzauberung (disenchantment) in the domain of art.”^[30]

Benjamin himself explained the unusual approach of the essay to a friend by saying his study “depicts the mirage of the nineteenth century seen through a bloody fog in a future liberated and non-magical condition.”^[31] In this comment we can see that the Weberian concept of disenchantment is not the only narrative here. Benjamin’s preparatory notes for the first version of “The Work of Art” include eight “Preliminary Theses”. The first four theses name various effects of “the technological reproducibility of the work of art”. These are: the artwork’s “reassembling”, its “actualisation”, its “literarisation” (crossed out and replaced by “politicization”), and finally, its “wearing out”.^[32] “The history of art”, he wrote in preparatory notes for the second version of the essay, “is a history of prophecies”. He explained:

every age possesses its own new but uninheritable potential to interpret the prophecies that the art of past epochs conveys to it. It is the most important task of art history to decipher in the great artworks of the past the prophecies valid for the epoch of its writing. […] In order for these prophecies to become comprehensible, circumstances must have come to fruition, ahead of which the work of art has rushed, often by centuries, often also by just a few years. These circumstances are, for one thing, specific societal transformations, which alter the function of art, and, for another, certain mechanical inventions.^[33]

Benjamin’s account of the historical transition to modernity in the essay is theological, historical materialist, and messianic insofar as it is a redemptive, revolutionary and combative dream interpretation. In place of the technological, scientific and economic process of disenchantment, Benjamin emphasises crisis and class struggle. He argues that photography brought about an upheaval for art. “For when, with the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of production (namely photography, which emerged at the same time as Socialism), art felt the approach of that crisis which a century later has become unmistakable, it reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art.”^[34] Also, rather than seeing disenchantment as something secured once and for all by modernity, Benjamin shows time and time again that the progressive potential of new technologies ultimately depends on the revolutionary eradication of the social conditions of exploitation, oppression and control.

Fascism features prominently in the essay, not only because the fight against National Socialism was an urgent task, but because it represents an expression of modernity under the sign of myth, which “attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations which they strive to abolish.”^[35] And the fate of art in the age of technological reproducibility depends not on developments within the forces of production conceived as an independent variable, but on the outcome of struggles over the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production. So, in the words of Ariella Azoulay in her epochal book The Civil Contract of Photography (2008), Benjamin showed that photography “was the forerunner of a missed revolution. The body of citizens was given the means to instigate change, but the relations between these citizens were newly regulated through a unified sovereign power, most often on the basis of a national model, in conformity with coercive rules of exclusion, hierarchical order, discrimination, exploitation, and oppression.”^[36]

It is the emphasis on the transformation of the relations of production as necessary to release the potential of new technologies that forms the basis of Benjamin’s theory of cult-value and exhibition-value in his discussion of photography and film.

Art history might be seen as the working out of a tension between two polarities within the artwork itself, its course determined by shifts in the balance between the two. These two are the artwork’s cult value and its exhibition value. Artistic production begins with figures in the service of magic. What is important is that they are present, not that they are seen. The elk depicted by Stone Age man on the walls of his cave is an instrument of magic, and is exhibited to others only coincidentally; what matters is that the see it. Cult value as such even tends to keep the artwork out of certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the cella; certain images of the Madonna remain covered nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are not visible to the viewer at ground level. With the emancipation of specific artistic practices from the service of ritual, the opportunities for exhibiting their products increase.^[37]

In certain parts of the argument, Benjamin stresses the transformative nature of the forces of production, arguing that the possibility of printing large quantities of images of works of art is incompatible with their cult-value and inflates their exhibition-value. However, he argues that exhibition-value precedes the rise of the technological reproducibility of works of art, and in fact the crisis that photography represents for art was evident before the invention of photography, when the public exhibition of works of art became established. Benjamin explains: “A painting has always exerted a claim to be viewed primarily by a single person or by a few. The simultaneous viewing of paintings by a large audience, as happens in the nineteenth century, is an early symptom of the crisis in painting, a crisis triggered not only by photography but, in a relatively independent way, by the artwork’s claim to the attention of the masses.”^[38]

“The uniqueness of the work of art is identical with its embeddedness in the context of tradition.”^[39] Works of art are ripped from one context and rehoused in others, so that a statue might be installed first in a temple, then in a garden and finally in a museum, finding new uses (worship, decoration, knowledge) but remaining unique throughout, and, significantly, with the value of the museum object being underpinned by the ritual function of the statue in the temple. This is important because, “as soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionized.”^[40] The film industry counteracts the revolution by replicating old social relations in new commercial terms—e.g. the Hollywood star system reviving the aura of the stage actor. And yet film, which is the first fully reproducible technology of image production, he says, alters the relationship of the masses to art insofar as “[a]ny person today can lay claim to being filmed”,^[41] and “[s]ome of the actors taking part in Russian films are not actors in our sense but people who portray themselves—and primarily in their own work process.”^[42]

Technological reproducibility, Benjamin argues, has the potential to rid art of “aura”, but it is also the basis of Nazi cinema’s celebration of myth. Benjamin repeats this pattern of juxtaposing progressive and reactionary examples—Eugene Atget and l’art pour l’art, communist and fascist film, Hollywood movies and Russian factography, Dada and futurism—in what Leslie calls a “double reading of actual and potential developments”.^[43] Benjamin’s distinction between cult-value and exhibition-value is a tool for thinking about these ongoing divisions. Hence, Benjamin criticises theorists of photography and film who attempted to elevate it to the status of art by reading cultic elements into it rather than recognising the revolutionary potential of technological reproducibility.

Next I want to reconsider the history of the exhibition through a form of “double reading” characterised by conflict and crisis. The exhibition, as a technique or social form—i.e. a specific arrangement of social relations between people expressed through objects and spaces—is not to be understood as universal and given. Nor does it follow an organic historical pattern of birth, maturity and decline. In a “double reading” of the history of the exhibition, it arises out of a crisis in the antecedent social formation and being symptomatic of a new set of conflicts and contradictions that are, in part, expressed in struggles internal to exhibiting practices—as well as the struggle between exhibiting practices and alternatives to the exhibition form.

Redefining the Exhibition

The early history of art exhibitions has acquired a new set of meanings today when the exhibition format has once again entered into a period of pronounced crisis.^[44] This is expressed in at least three different ways. First, in contemporary art practice, institutional critique has eroded the neutrality of the exhibition as a technique.^[45] Second, the exhibition has lost the unrivalled status it enjoyed within modernism as the principal format of art’s encounter—now deployed alongside activities, events and projects that are co-produced with communities rather than presented to viewers.^[46] And third, the movement to decolonise the museum calls into question the customary practices of putting cultural artefacts on display, especially with the critical proposal that such objects ought to be returned to their source cultures in order to be used rather than viewed.^[47]

Twenty years ago, a generation of curators sought to demonstrate the art museum’s independence from the exhibition form and liberated the art-going public from the constraints on their agency by the form of the exhibition.^[48] Despite the persistence of exhibitions alongside more adventurous cultural modes of engagement, museums and galleries of the new variety were no longer organised exclusively around the modernist focus on the art object and the principal mode in which that specific type of object had come to be displayed: the exhibition. As a result, even if the exhibition retained much of its power within the sector, the proposition that the exhibition is the museums’ default mode of address was somewhat weakened. Although the exhibition form was not immediately and fatally condemned, curators and artists explored an exciting array of alternative forms of assembly and collective action. These debates on the exhibition were often intense and sometimes heated, but they tended to have very little grasp of the actual social circumstances in which the exhibition emerged as a form. With all this in mind, there is undoubted value in asserting that the category of the exhibition, like the ontology of art according to Peter Osborne, is infinite.^[49] A different kind of critical work is done by paying attention to the specific social, political and economic conditions that were operative when the concept of the exhibition evolved and the conventions of the public exhibition of works of art were first established.

The exhibition, it needs to be underlined, is a specific form of social encounter. That is to say, when certain things are exhibited, a social relation is established between one party, who exhibits things, and another party, who views things. Insofar as the party to whom things are exhibited is considered to be a public or the public, the exhibition is also an instrument of the public sphere. To redefine the exhibition in social terms in this way is to shift the focus of attention in an important way, which recognises that the act of exhibiting has social and material dimensions that are not inherent to what is exhibited. The exhibition is a particular social form of encounter in which the relationship between one group (those who exhibit) establish a relationship with another group (those who are exhibited to) via something else (what is exhibited). Exhibiting therefore is a technique of social assembly, a mode of subject formation and an instrument of the public sphere. Exhibitions constitute characteristic patterns of social assembly in which individuals and groups occupy a space in particular ways. At the same time, the exhibition participates in the formation of the subject as a viewer of that which is exhibited to them and as the addressee of a the exhibitionary form of address.

What I mean by saying that the art exhibition is not merely an arrangement of objects, but rather a specific social configuration, is clarified by acknowledging that painters and sculptors of the guild and the court before the eighteenth century did not display their works in exhibitions, because the social relations of the artisan workshop and noble patronage were more familiar than anonymous and more face-to-face than mediated by objects. Exhibitions of works of art are introduced in a moment of crisis, when it is clear that the feudal social relations of art have collapsed, but the art market has not yet formed around a network of gallerists and dealers. Hence, the exhibition arises historically during the transitional period between the aristocratic hierarchy of the arts and the modern category of art.

For social theorists in the traditions of Louis Althusser and Foucault (and for art historians influenced by them), the exhibitionary condition is best understood through an analysis of its institutions, specifically the gallery and museum.^[50] However, like the academies before them, exhibitions were initially homeless events.^[51] It was not the gallery or museum that gave shape to the exhibition as a social form, but the exhibition that provided the script for the gallery and museum. The art exhibition comes to sit within a broader set of exhibitionary practices, institutions and spaces. The museum, the library, the school, the public park and so on constitute a new spatial configuration of citizenship and of being fully human, which is at least partly anticipated by the advent of the exhibition as a social form.^[52] Exhibitions of one kind or another take place in all these spaces, but it is the museum which has come to be associated with the exhibition in its hegemonic form.

Bennett has described museums as “differencing machines”.^[53] He characterised the discursive constitution of the museum as a distinctive spatial configuration through a triple movement—temporal, spatial and epistemological—in which the temporary spectacles of curiosities on the edge of the city were converted into a permanent scientific display of objects in the city centre. Bennett located the museum within a differential field of “places of popular assembly”, including the circus, travelling fair, amusement park, international exhibition, department store and pub, to which we can add the theatre, the place of worship, the lecture hall and the workplace as well as the salon and the art exhibition. Foucault’s distinction between disciplinary and governmental regimes serves as the template for Bennett’s account of the political instrumentalisation of the museum.

Among other things, studies of this kind are important because they reconnect the legitimating discourses of civic humanism to the economic and governmental discourses that were deliberately and conscientiously denigrated in the civic humanist opposition of private and public virtues, and the preference for disinterest over self-interest, and so on. However, when this critical work consists in little more than translating one set of discourses into another, especially when the former contains traces of possibility whereas the latter focuses primarily on actuality, the study of dominant social tendencies needs to be supplemented with an investigation into the full range of subordinate and insubordinate counter-tendencies whose promises have been put on hold.^[54]

Wayne Modest, whose work in the museum continually returns to the legacies of colonialism, has paid close attention to the effects of transporting a religious icon from a cathedral or mosque to a museum of art or a gallery. Clearly, the category of the human is redefined by the movement of works of art from a variety of particular contexts to the singular space of the museum. And arguably, the return of objects from museums to contexts of use amounts to a fresh redefinition of the human. And yet, Modest is rightly sceptical of the idea that “the anthropological museum [is] obsolete and the art museum [is] a space for criticality.”^[55] Modest argues that the normative idea that the visitor to the museum ought to feel enriched acts as a barrier to the idea that the museum might be a place invested in “critical discomfort”.^[56] Modest has also noticed a specific relationship between museums and exhibitions that has mostly gone unnoticed in the literature.

I struggled and struggle with people who want to think the colonial as just a moment in time that has passed. This created a false distance between the reckoning with colonial afterlives and the work of the museum as a cultural institution, even though the afterlives and legacies of colonialism in the present continued to structure relations or hierarchies which govern our lives today. The work, it was felt, was not ours to be done: We were just there to do exhibitions.^[57]

In art’s institutions as much as in the anthropological museum, the political character of the exhibition has been articulated on a case-by-case basis—this exhibition is conservative or critical, patriarchal or feminist, Eurocentric or decolonising, etc., etc. Hence, the exhibition appears in art’s discourses as both a technique of power and a technique of liberation or critique. The technique of the exhibition is not exclusive to dominant culture—what bell hooks describes as “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”^[58]—and the dominant gallery and museum system of art that elevates and sanctifies domination as the exemplification of universal human flourishing. At the same time, it has to be said, if the exhibition is not exclusively a technique of hegemonic culture, it is certainly not a tool specifically designed for the use of the array of institutions that have been developed explicitly in opposition to art’s complicity in a long list of systems of domination, oppression and exploitation. In focusing on the politics of exhibitions, the discourses of art have not paid adequate attention to the political character of the exhibition itself; as a specific social form that arose in response to a crisis in the antecedent cultural order.

Historically, the exhibition does not present itself as a single solution to a single problem. Several histories have come to be plaited together in accounts of the emergence of the art exhibition. The exhibition features in the historical reconstruction of the founding of the public art museum, for instance, as if either the birth of the museum is the material basis for the advent of the exhibition, or without providing a separate account of the development of the exhibition. The exhibition is similarly treated in histories of the birth of the public, the rise of modernity, the onset of art’s commodification and the transformation of art by technology. As such, several distinct difficulties are brought to a certain kind of resolution by several functions of the exhibition. This means the exhibition is a contradictory form and its legacies cannot be combined into a coherent condition. In order to capture the complexity of the historical emergence of the exhibition I want to think of it as a social form. The exhibition, in this analysis, is a technique brought about within the changing social relations of art production, circulation and distribution. This occurred during the passage from traditional artisanal practices to the modern combination of market and non-market mechanisms built into galleries, museums, art schools, magazines, academia and the public subsidy of art.

In her landmark study of public art museums as institutions of civic ritual, Carol Duncan explained that the “transformation of the palace into a public space accessible to everyone” gave the museum a double function in the constitution of the public that it was meant to serve.^[59] First, the museum was a place in which the public as a social body was made visible to itself. And second, the museum gave the public not only somewhere suitable to go, but also something suitable to do. The exhibition gives form to the activity of the public. If the museum choreographs the behaviour of its visitors, the exhibition is its score. But just like New Institutionalism speculated about a future in which the museum can survive the decline of the exhibition, the exhibition existed prior to the establishment of the museum.

There is a good reason for the relative neglect of the exhibition in the history and sociology of art and its institutions. To put it bluntly, since the development of the exhibition is not the root cause of art’s modern institutional and discursive formation under capitalism, it is justifiable to consider the rise of the exhibition as an effect of and therefore secondary to the real drivers of art’s social history. Instead of constructing a history of the exhibition, therefore, it makes more sense to include the rise of the exhibition within various other histories. And yet, a separate history of the emergence of the exhibition within the history of art is necessary, because the invention of the art exhibition is not strictly contemporary with the birth of the public museum of art, the modern art market, the formation of a public for art, or any other institutional or infrastructural innovation. Although the exhibition emerges as a response to broader social changes that also bring about the museum, art market and so on, the exhibition is not the epiphenomenon of the academy, museum or gallery, and intersects with these other changes in complex, uneven and staggered ways.

When the exhibition form is in crisis, even mildly, as it is today, it is enlightening to look again at how its introduction was traumatic, and to be reminded of the original crisis that brought it into being. The historical passage under investigation begins with various forms of display of artworks always in conjunction with other things. This passage ends, however, with the exhibition of artworks by themselves in rooms or buildings set aside specifically to exhibit art. Evidently, the birth of the exhibition is hesitant and hazardous, because the exhibition does not initially seem suitable for works of art and there were always alternatives to it that avoided its particular way of framing artworks and assembling objects and people, which was understood from the outset as a constraint.

The exhibition emerges at the same time as the category of art comes into focus as a distinct class of objects—as distinct from craft, commerce, industry and science. The definition of art—as distinct from the arts of painting, sculpture, music, poetry and dance—begins to form under the pressure of colonial and racial hierarchies that also set art off from the ethnographic, which results in different modes of exhibition making. So, what separates art from everything else is not that it is exhibited: everything is exhibited. However, each category of thing has its own particular mode of exhibition that appears to be suited to its nature. Art develops a distinctive economy, a distinctive type of labour and a distinctive social division of labour, and it also develops its own academic fields of study—principally, art history, art criticism, aesthetic philosophy—but it is also necessary for artworks to be exhibited as art.

A clue to the emergence of the exhibition in advance of the museum is carried by Jacques-Luis David’s use of the English word “exhibition” to introduce the first public display of his work in the aftermath of the revolutionary abolition of the Academy. If we take David’s exhibition as exemplary of a particular way of thinking about the historical significance of the art exhibition, we begin by acknowledging that it arose out of a crisis. Looking for a new way of generating funds for painting in the absence of the network of aristocratic patrons and the academic Salon, David, who had spent four years on the painting The Intervention of the Sabine Women, hired a venue in which it would be on display to the public for the price of a small fee. The painting remained on show for five years and David earned himself a fortune. If we follow the money, therefore, Luiz Renato Martins is entirely justified in describing the public exhibition of fee-paying visitors as hinging on “the painter as a private entrepreneur and the market as judge”.^[60] And commentators at the time certainly accused David of commercialism, so much so, in fact, that the fee-paying exhibition immediately acquired a bad reputation in France. However, David’s entrepreneurialism is atypical, both of the role assigned to the artist within the art market and of the enterprising capitalist. David takes on the task of generating an income from his paintings without the help of a dealer and without selling his product as a commodity.

David produced a pamphlet to accompany his exhibition, both to explain what an exhibition is, and to publish a plea for the public to overlook the commercial aspect of the fee-paying exhibition. David wrote: “The painter’s practice of exhibiting his works to the eyes of his fellow citizens, in return for individual remunerations, is not a new one… the practice of public exhibitions was accepted by the Greeks; and we can hardly doubt that, in the realm of the arts, we need not fear of losing our way by following in their footsteps… In our day this practice is observed in England, where it is called exhibition.”^[61] Exhibition, in this specific sense, does not exist within the feudal system of guild and courtly patronage. Guilds had shops and had no need of exhibitions. Patrons did not purchase works from exhibitions, nor did they exhibit their collections to the public except in the extremely limited sense that they would install works of art in private “galleries” to show their noble house guests.

David does not replace the patron with the dealer or collector, in the way that the social history of art presupposes in the history of the transition from feudalism to capitalism as a history of the passage from patronage to the market. David’s exhibition is significant, because the patron is replaced with the public. It is also important, from an economic point of view, that the public do not purchase the work, but pay an entrance fee to see the painting. Its economic significance is that it interrupts and potentially diverts the alleged passage from patronage to the market. So, even though there were exhibitions before David’s public display of The Intervention of the Sabine Women, it stands out within the early history of the art exhibition because it exemplifies a social function for the exhibition that is independent of the guild, the court, the academy and the art market.

The exhibition emerged historically as a response to a crisis in the dual system of guild and court, when commissions and patrons started to dry up according to the rules and regulations of the old system, and when a middle-class market materialised to purchase cheaper readymade works at fairs and town markets. The significance of the historical emergence of the art exhibition is missed if we overstate the similarity between the innovation of the Salons and Annual Exhibitions of the academy system on the one hand, with the advent of the art market on the other. Seeing these early forms of art exhibition as nothing but “shop windows” deprives the analysis of the substantial difference between the academy exhibitions and the actual shop windows and market stalls used by artisan painters and sculptors at the time. It is vital to acknowledge the difference between the salon exhibition and the shop window, because the academy system was built on the failure of academy painters to win the right to sell their works, a right that belonged exclusively to the guilds.

When painters, sculptors and others produced bespoke works of art for individuals that were known to them, exhibitions were largely unknown apart from in the shop windows and in “painting rooms” or waiting rooms beside studios so that the visitor (patron, collector, sitter or potential sitter for a portrait) could see the quality of the products. The display of works, prior to the development of galleries, took place primarily in the proximity of the workshop, or in fairs and special marketplaces where stalls and showrooms could be rented by guild members on designated days.^[62]

Prior to the first exhibition, various informal practices of exhibiting were established within the old regime. Prominent among these was the princely “gallery”, or reception room, displaying works of art and other things to visiting dignitaries and which served as a backdrop to official ceremonies. Works of art could also be seen by the public a day or two prior to their sale at auction houses. Artisans were additionally permitted to display works in the windows of their workshops and some works might be placed about the workshop as examples. Also, some guild members became dealers and sold their works and the works of others in the local market or in a “picture shop” or print shop, in which works were on display for sale alongside art supplies, commercial print copies of popular paintings and other merchandise. And it also became common, especially in England, for artists to have a room adjacent to their studios that was used as a waiting room for prospective sitters and collectors where they displayed finished work.

The art exhibition, therefore, is the result of a process that James Clifford has traced in which categories indexed to the colonial division between the West and the rest splits the destination of cultural objects to the art gallery or the ethnographic museum.^[63] Art and the art exhibition emerge within the academic system of the fine arts, which gave a new basis for art to be installed in national public museums. These have been understood as permanent venues at the heart of the city in contrast with the temporary fair on its outskirts, but the origin of the exhibition also require the formation of the differential field in which the art exhibition comes to set itself off from exhibitions of ethnographic objects, scientific inventions, commercial products and popular entertainment.

The exhibition is a historically specific mode of display. Display perhaps seems to be only one of the possible forms taken by an exhibition—and perhaps the most conventional and least interesting— but display is necessary to the conception of the exhibition insofar as it captures the idea of the act of exhibiting. The exhibition is a mode of display insofar as something—anything—is exhibited, but it is a specific mode of display insofar as exhibiting something—anything—is different from other modes of display. It can be difficult to distinguish the exhibition from shop window displays, media events, public information announcements, pedagogical situations, activist events and other forms of display, because they often use the same technologies and styles of display, among other things.