As I tend to tell my first year students (for better or worse), and as I’ve written elsewhere, if you enter an exhibition, in a museum, a gallery or wherever, you arrive at a distinct cosmos, one with, as it were, its own laws of “nature”: spatiality and gravity, lighting and rhythm, the relationality and coexistence of your body to the objects but also of the objects to each other. In some cases, the laws of this cosmos are clear. Upon entering a retrospective of Picasso, Breughel or Van Gogh, there will be, for most of us, a sense of the rules organising this world, rules of colour and of perspective, of the application of paint and the sensation of texture. These rules have been canonised, after all, have been written into set narratives of signification, in which specific aesthetic strategies call to mind particular meanings, in the same way that we are accustomed to the rules of, say, a Hollywood romantic comedy, always already aware of the plot twists about to, and unlikely to, happen.
In the case of the contemporary art exhibition, the rules of the world are however, often unclear. You venture into a space not necessarily knowing what to expect, not sure how to read the signs, uncertain what may and what may not happen. Why does this installation stand next to that oil painting? What is the relationship between the pink in one sculpture and the pink in a video loop? How are media linked? Styles? Textures? Ideas? Indeed, the way I teach my students to engage with exhibitions (but again, this may be the worst advice) is as intergalactic adventurers (hopefully not in a colonial sense), arriving in an unknown world whose laws and customs they need to learn if they want to survive. Each visitor has to find his or her own strategy of survival: one reads the information cards, if they are there; another follows the path marked by the artist or curator; a third meanders back and forth between positions; some let themselves be led by aesthetics, by resonances between forms, textures and materials; while others choose to focus on conceptual questions. In most cases, your body will come to understand this world. Maybe you feel an instant click, or the connection might develop more gradually. Perhaps you find the world to be incoherent, its logic inconsistent, its structure uneven. In some cases, for all your efforts, you cannot immerse yourself in the world, which, depending on your character, you either assume is your fault or that of the exhibition. It might well be both; it may be exclusively the latter’s (the bubble that you hope pops soon).
In any case, what these art bubbles, these art worlds, encourage you to do, precisely because they are unfamiliar, or because they may not make sense, is to reconsider the conventional notions you might have about what a world is, what it consists of, what it allows for – Schiller’s aesthetic education. It opens up the possibility of the alternative, including, one would hope, an alternative to the logic of the market. Art creates openings within the fluid fabric of the foam, spaces that cells can move into, allowing the other cells around it to switch place, restructure. Indeed, it is precisely because art is globular, enclosed and without solid substance, precisely because there is a virtual rather than an “actual” achievement, that it is able to open up. It may not offer a model beyond the globe or beyond foam, but it offers the notion that there may be such a model, precisely by continuously restructuring the very fabric of what foam is.
Timotheus Vermeulen in Tank (Vol 8 Issue 7, Spring 2016)