Far from an approach to art centered on works and artists, Jérôme Glicenstein makes the exhibition The heart of the aesthetic experience. The exhibition not only links objects, places and audiences, but it also helps to reveal the meaning of works in a specific way.
The ambition of this work, very well documented and quite exhaustive on the question, is to travel – and thereby enrich and rewrite – the history of art in terms of this framing of works, these situations and meetings, these events, that constitute the exhibitions. The general thesis of the work consists in demonstrating how works of art never present themselves, in which it is impossible to ignore the exhibition in the apprehension of a work. From this lack of neutrality of the gesture, it follows that talking about works, it is always more or less talking about “ impressions received during a specific exhibition (P. 10). Any discourse on art must therefore, consequently, speak of the conditions of an encounter rather than an ontological essence of the work: what is a work without its exhibition ? Can we read a work without its exhibition ? What happens to the meaning of the work, of its identity through the movements which it is the subject ? Isn’t the exhibition where it is built and is being built and saw this “ art world »Dear to Anglo-Saxon analytical or pragmatic theorists, is it not the site of art, the place where art takes place ? For the purposes of his argument, J. Glicenstein comes to study (and to postulate) exposure according to four distinct acceptations and issues: according to him, it would always be fiction (chapter 1) insofar as it is never neutral, and that it always underlies an author. It therefore produces communication situations (chapter 2), events (chapter 3) and constitute ultimately The art site (chapter 4).
Exhibition as fiction ?
Exhibition is not a fact, or even a problem, which would be specific to contemporary art. One of the first contributions of the book is to extend a historical thread and show that the exhibition is available through the categories of museography (classical age) or scenography (modern age) then police station At the contemporary age, all mobilizing the notion of author, thus enduring the entry of the exhibition in the fiction register. If the first part of the demonstration is rather well nourished and convincing, the second which consists in identifying the exhibition with a fiction from the notion of author is much less so. The category of “ fiction »Appears more as an abstract generalization or a password than as an operating and meaningful concept: that there has been an intention and interpretation in the gesture consisting in presenting a work does not imply ipso facto Fiction, a concept that does not oppose that of neutrality. Heard in the Foucauldian sense of authority, the notion of author appears better exploited and the more convincing concept: the links between the exposure procedures and the concepts of disciplines and polishing are well seen (p. 88), similarly the need to attach the device to expose to an author to the contemporary age due to the triple imperative of the theme, the stylistic, and the coherence claimed by the spectator constitutes interesting developments.
Language and device
From the fictional register or not, the exhibition is undeniably a construction, essentially of a textual order according to Jérôme Glicenstein. Sometimes summoning a semiological (Barthes), pragmatic (Genette) or archaeological (Foucault) grid, the author analyzes in the strict sense of the term all the elements at the heart of the underlying, implicit or explicit issues of the exhibitions, which accompany the public presentation of the works, and which he calls, in his analogy of exposure to text, sub-tests.
What value and role to attribute to all these tools whose function is to stage and value the objects presented ? To what extent a cartel, a pictogram, a hanging, a lighting system, a title, a presentation modality etc., do they not influence the perception and the reception of the works, induce an interpretation and constitute a bias reflections of theoretical and ideological concerns ? It is at this stage of the study that the ontological question arises and that the exhibition intervenes not as a posterior and subordinate event at the work but plays on the contrary a constitutive role. Because by preparing the spectator to receive a certain type of aesthetic experience, sub-texts or pautexts (Genette) play the role of mediator : They ensure the conditions for the possibility of a meeting between the work and the spectator. Indispensable vectors, they are what the work takes place and happens.
Thus, the exhibition transforms the work “ in support of relationships, because of mediation situations (P. 119), in fact affecting the very essence of the work. These mediation situations, in accordance with the guiding thesis of the work, are far from neutral: they are on the contrary the material translation of antagonistic conceptions, to political, ideological but also educational issues. Are works of art present themselves or he accompanied their exhibition ? Are they addressed to everyone, and if so with or without explanation ? So many apparently technical formulations, behind which opposite beliefs and convictions are clarified between the proponents of an elitist position and the supporters of a democratization of art, by the means precisely of these procedures and systems of codification and presentations of the works.
At a time when the figure of the mediator invades the spaces of exhibitions of contemporary art, to alternately fill his deficit of understanding on the part of the general public (it is enough to evoke the last force of art in 2009 at the Grand Palais), we would have expected the author a more committed, even controversial decryption, of ideology, partly security and controlling, at work in this type of mediation. If the issues are posed, they are only partially resolved. Same criticism of contemporary art, including some of these currents since the 1960s (Mail Artart in situ, land art, arts in public space …) were precisely at heart to escape these prescriptions and sought to challenge an uninformed spectator and not yet put under control of the artistic institution ; deeply overwhelming our conception of both the work and the exhibition. If the exhibition draws well an art history or if art is also an exhibition story as suggested by the title, it would then be necessary to show how artistic creation incorporates its dimensions of presentations within the work and itself produces its own procedures and devices …
The Art website
As we will have understood, the exhibition and all the executives and procedures attached to it generate a specific understanding and guides perception, constitutive for the spectator of this famous “ art world Which, for Anglo-Saxon theorists, is the only tangible reality capable of describing and defining artistic fact. There cannot be in this resolutely analytical logic, neither essence nor of art unity but a bundle of collective actions whose art is the product and whose exposure constitutes an essential element.
She builds a framework, a procedure for setting up the work of art with her expectations and her surprises, defining a presentation adapted or not to the public she aims. It is one of the cogs by which art has accessed the public dimension which has been its since the XVIIIe century and which defines it in its own (work as public space of judgment) ; Indispensable mediation without which we cannot think of our relationship to works, art and its history.
If the work of art cannot be defined or even thinking independently of the procedures by which is shown and made public, remains to be determined what is played out for it in the movements of all kinds that it undergoes, always more numerous in the era of commodification. Is a work of art immutable during the various exhibitions ? Is there a uniqueness or essence of art behind or regardless of its demonstrations, its exhibitions ? From the modernist temptation to consider the work as pure autonomous form freed from its contexts of creation, reception and presentation, to the liberal temptation to consider it as a commodity capable of circulating in envy through time and ages-what meaning is there to present, for works and for the public, Roman sculptures from Louvre to Abu Dhabi ? -, many among theorists and art professionals, who neglect this eminently contextual dimension of the work of art, without which she cannot transcend her simple object status.