The last exhibition of the 20th century [Lumbung 1 (documenta 15)]

Response to Charles Esche, “The First Exhibition of the Twenty-First Century—Lumbung 1 (Documenta Fifteen), What Happened, and What It Might Mean Two Years On.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 24, no. 1

Large-scale international exhibitions flourished in the nineteen-nineties, as Internet technologies underwritten by the Californian Ideology promised a pathway out of state-managed cultural agonisms of the Cold War era, enabling truly global reach for capitalist modes of content circulation. The oligarchal platforms that would turn dissensus into a business model and replace democracy with telecracy^[1] were yet to be imagined, and biennialist expansion did not then threaten to thwart indie self-organisation. Ade Darmawan, in a conversation with Nuraini Juliastuti on ‘horizontal organisation’ published in 2012, identified ruangrupa as ‘part of the 1990s generation, which greatly admires that of the 60s’^[2], noting their attraction to graphic designer David Carson’s work for Raygun magazine, which is perhaps the most nineties thing ever: a mid-nineties interview with Carson was one of my own first publications for an artworld periodical.

The parallel proliferation of artist-led organisation through the nineties can be situated in Marina Vishmidt’s analysis of the speculative mode of production, with art finding a role in capitalism as an “aperture in use”, paving the way for a speculative process of “imaginary subsumption” where as-yet uncodified symbolic relations from near and far could be extracted and circulated in a neoliberal content economy, positing artistic work as the apotheosis of creative flexible labour^[3]. The “artist-run initiative” would begin to find its role among the programming of state-backed institutions, risk-managed by curatoriality’s expanding author-function. But we can perhaps see more clearly today that nineties contemporary art’s valorisation of alternatives and diversity was fundamentally perched atop an organisational logic of Western imperialism, as documenta 15 illustrated.

The Western concept of ‘cultural development’ as an ideology of freedom and autonomy against an ‘under-developed’ cultural formation on the other side of the civilisational colour line is the historical rationale for cultural funding of both state and market in the West. In the creative industries era, cultural development could technocratically incorporate tourism and real estate economies to help fuel the merry-go-round of serial placemaking in a globalised biennale culture. Perhaps in the passionate retrospect Esche gives us – appropriately gloomier than the more feisty original talk — we can sense how ruangrupa were doomed to fail in their impossible attempt to offer Germany lumbung as a pluralised, community-based articulation of bildung (education/formation). ruangrupa’s selective inattention to the natural boundary setting of liberal authorial responsibilisation in Europe turned out to be indigestible, as Europe would not accept their collective predication of subjectivity as a supplement to its individualist Christian-heritage secularism. Lumbung 1 revealed how the supposedly cosmopolitan ideologies of Western contemporary art were unable to divest from their own long-held neo-colonial birthright to be the taxonomists of global culture, from staging World’s Fairs in the nineteenth century to the contemporary biennial as a kind of aesthetic petting zoo. Diversifying the curatorial wardens of this carceral complex helped bolster the democratic optics of contemporary art, but only as long as the staged decolonial aspirations left the sensibilities of those at the helm of the art-finance machine fundamentally untroubled.

This imperialist conception of non-Western non-Enlightenment also took shape among those in the critical wings of the contemporary art egology. We should remember Hito Steyerl’s spectacular display of non-solidarity in withdrawing from the exhibition, stating that they ‘have no faith in the [documenta] organization’s ability to mediate and translate complexity’^[4], avoiding any direct critique of the curatorial approach but more or less saying to ruangrupa: not managerial, diligent or compliant enough. Or Sven Lütticken, who characterised ruangrupa’s method as ‘mind-boggling, bumbling’^[5] because of its decentralisation and effacement of singularly-held authorial responsibility. They both inhabit the developmentalist imaginary, attributing to ruangrupa an impairment of comprehension stemming from ruangrupa’s faith in collective autonomy explicitly against European fantasies of moral grace that animate the “global” artistic mindset.

As Esche alludes to, the deliberate obfuscation of Germany’s colonial history has resulted in a memory culture that is fuelled by moves to innocence that are all too familiar here in the settler colony^[6]. And now the “narcissistic anti-anti semitism”^[7] provoked into response by Lumbung 1 has more devastating consequences outside the art world as the West funds and arms a genocidal occupation in Gaza. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak formalised the colonial mindset in the psychoanalytic concept of foreclosure^[8]: a fundamental signifier (the colonised) associated with negative feeling is expelled from the coloniser’s symbolic repertoire, becoming unspeakable, leaving a specific negative space in the psychic formation that must be constantly shuttled around but can never be allowed a mode of direct address, lest the bad feeling associated with the expelled signifier return. If the psychic armature of denial was lowered to allow recognition of the signifier (in this case, the racist nature of the settler-colonial solution to Europe’s ‘Jewish Question’ in Palestine) the integrity of the subjectivity built around the psychic expulsion (Western anti anti-semitism as atonement) would collapse. For Lacan, psychosis — denial of reality — is the consequence of foreclosure.  The Western psychosis around Palestine lays bare the corrupt nature of the West’s colonial claim as the natural stage for the world’s cultures. In its gestures toward multicultural pluralism, the commissioning of ruangrupa for Lumbung 1 was perhaps the last gasp of the West’s nineties promise. No large European exhibition will delegate this level of curatorial autonomy outside Western logics of managerialism again: it was the last exhibition of the twentieth century.

^[1] Bernard Stiegler, “Telecracy Against Democracy,” Cultural Politics 6, no. 2 (July 1, 2010): 171–80.

^[2] Nuraini Juliastuti, “Ruangrupa: A Conversation on Horizontal Organisation,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 30 (2012): 125.

^[3] Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital, vol. 176, Historical Materialism (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 220–224.

^[4] Taylor Dafoe, “Artist Hito Steyerl Has Pulled Her Work From Documenta, Saying She Has ‘No Faith’ in Organizers Ability to Address Antisemitism Accusations,” Artnet, July 8, 2022, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/hito-steyerl-pulls-out-documenta-2144265.

^[5]Sven Lütticken, “From Farce to Tragedy,” Sven Lütticken: Texts and Projects (blog), June 21, 2022, https://svenlutticken.org/2022/06/21/from-farce-to-tragedy/.

^[6] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

^[7] Daniel Denvir, “The German Question W/ Emily Dische-Becker,” Podcast,The Dig Radio, January 31, 2024, https://thedigradio.com/podcast/the-german-question-w-emily-dische-becker/.

^[8] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 4–6.

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