Fudge the Facts

In Exhibition Rhetorics, an essay written in the mid-nineties, Bruce Ferguson tries to think through the exhibition as a medium and rhetorical form. Exploring various mechanisms and interests at work, he notes:

Exhibitions are publicly sanctioned representations of identity, principally, but not exclusively, of the institutions which present them. They are narratives which use art objects as elements in institutionalized stories that are promoted to an audience. *

While Ferguson is speaking about exhibitions in general, it’s interesting to consider what this might mean in relation to the rhetorics of biennials and publicly sanctioned representations of identity. Next to displaying curatorial intentions and individual art works, biennials have always reflected on the nation-state, host city and facilitating art institutions which promote and house them. Through them, the local and international are brought into juxtaposition. Perhaps the most classic example is the Venice Biennale with its interface much like that of a grand world fair. Borders are reinstated by jewel-like pavilions housing each country’s selected artist or artists. However, most contemporary biennials with relatively new infrastructures are less explicitly zoned. Much like today’s complex geopolitics, lines between the local and global are more subtle and blurred, but nonetheless distinct identities are asserted. To understand how a biennial functions as a rhetorical form, it’s key to acknowledge the stakeholders and the stories about identity which they wish to tell. Of course not all agendas are conscious, but by entering into an open debate and attempting to unmask and map various motives in advance, counter-images and narratives might be given space to emerge.

*download full text with references

This essay commissioned by the Witte de With, looks at the relation between art and theory. It was written in 1999. While still on the site, it is sold out.

A Journey from Démodé to Displacement: Some Reflections on the Relation between Art and Theory

small excerpt from the essay:

“[…] I still believe the relation between art and theory to be both necessary and vital. As Gilles Deleuze aptly points out: ‘…from the moment a theory moves into its proper domain, it begins to encounter obstacles, walls and blockages which require its relay by another type of discourse (it is through this other discourse that it eventually passes to a different domain). Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another. No theory can develop without eventually encountering a wall, and practice is necessary for piercing this wall.’*

The liberative possibilities of such an alliance lie in the potential to pierce through walls thrown up by the process of theorizing and conversely to break down those erected by practice. However a truly open dialogue can only happen where there is a sense of mutual reciprocity or for that matter mutual risk; the dilemma is how to attain that state of reciprocity. My at times polemic argumentation and generalizations thus far have been used for the sake of driving home this question. How can art and theory proceed in order to strike up a conversation on an equal footing so those ‘relays’ can occur?

Although I have no prescriptive solutions to this question, as a beginning there are some primary elements which can be addressed. A more open dialogue between art and theory can be facilitated by setting aside falsely dichotomous models in search of interactive paradigms acknowledging the fluidity of social change and exchange. As Michel de Certeau writes in Culture in the Plural: ‘between a society and its scientific models, between a historical situation and the intellectual tools that belong to it, there exists a relation that constitutes a cultural system. In order to escape the sequestered isolation of their own specialized tools, artists and theorists must recognize that they are simultaneously products and partial producers of a cultural system. And entrenched in this condition, they share similar concerns and face the same prospects of their work being appropriated or assimilated by larger social and economic forces. Implicated in these networks, cultural production must be continually re-inserted, measured up and critically evaluated according to a variety of social dynamics.

It is also important to move away from classic constructs of theory versus practice by acknowledging the hybridity of each activity. Theory has its elements of practice, but all too often while critiquing structure, it remains unaware, unaccountable and above reproach in terms of its own manifestations. If theory begins to value its own form, then it is subject to similar representational quandaries and has a great deal to gain from a relation with art. Conversely, there are theoretical capacities in art-making. As the Critical Art Ensemble suggests, art can prepare ‘ the ground for the introduction of new realities and vision’ and ‘act as a catalyst for critical and imaginative thought.’ ** By realizing where these mutual territories lie, a relation between art and theory can be created which is based not on a division of labor - the one who does and the one who thinks- but on common issues and interests.

With these few starting points in mind, I am in favor of a relation between art and theory that refrains from the arrogance of expertise, rejects the hermetic tendencies of specialization , and allows the borders of each discipline to be continually redefined when brought into conversation with each other and broader social networks. I welcome an art and theory that shares the potential to critically reflect, speculate and most importantly transform perception, thought, belief and practices. Finally, I would hope for an institutional framework that fosters such and exchange and promotes moments of uncertainty, confusion, crossovers and perhaps even displacement.”

*Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Michel Foucault, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, Discourses: Conversations in Postmodern Art and Culture, ed. Russell Ferguson, William Olander, Marcia Tucker and Karin Fiss (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992)
**’Critical Art Ensemble in Conversation with Mark Dery’, Mute Magazine, No.10 (London: Skyscraper Digital Publishing) p.33

(A CARGO publication)
The essay, entitled An Encounter with an Image, can be found online here.

At the moment I’m gathering some of the publications I’ve contributed to. My analog essays have lingered on the shelf without finding their place with the rest of my digital work. As these books are archived, I’m hoping they’ll eventually become a page on this site. Ironically, I no longer have the digital files for most of these texts and am re-typing snippets to give you an idea of their content. This publication was not my first printed essay, but it is nonetheless near and dear to my heart.

The Phenomenology of Licorice and Other Dutch Myths, Renée Turner, Ordinary Marvel, YYZ Books, 2003

Susan Kealey was a friend. In the early nineties we were at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and both grappled with being displaced North Americans in the heart of the Lowlands. Sometimes we coped with laughter and other times we had a good old rant. In the end though, we were happy to have a chance to work abroad and were fascinated by what our new Dutch experience had to offer. But after our two year residency was over she moved on, and I stayed in the Netherlands. A few years later when I heard from her friends in Canada that she had died of cancer, I was shocked. Susan had struggled with leukemia for most of her life, and quite honestly she had escaped its grasp so often, I truly believed she was invincible.

When Jennifer Rudder and YYZ books wrote asking if I would contribute an essay to Ordinary Marvel, a monograph devoted to her work, I jumped at the occasion. It was a pleasure to look closely again at Susan’s pieces and remember her through the vibrancy of her practice. I wrote about The Phenomenology of Licorice, a series of photographs made during her stay in the Netherlands.


“Through her licorice collection, her editing and arranging of these somewhat absurd little perishable artifacts, Kealey builds a telling portrait of Dutch culture. This quality of extrapolating the profound from the banal, finding jewels in the detritus of everyday life is actually the hallmark of much of Susan Kealey’s work. She had a knack for suggesting complex narratives with the most minimal of props, in this case an insignificant type of candy, a sweet that is stashed in purses and pockets and consumed on the fly. While the Larousse Gastronomique defines licorice by its origins and ingredients, Kealey’s The Phenomenology of Licorice can be viewed as an illustrative tapestry: a patchwork of Dutch cultural narratives, ultimately adding credence to the adage that “you are what you eat.”

Ordinary Marvel can be purchased via YYZ Books