Academic Sessions: London 2008
The Year Was 2007: Historical Understanding, Difference and the Contemporary Exhibition Effect
Session Convenors:
Griselda Pollock, CentreCATH. and School of Fine Art/History of Art and Cultural Studies, at the University of Leeds g.f.s.pollock@leeds.ac.uk
Alison Rowley, School of Art and Design, University of Ulster aj.rowley@ulster.ac.uk
Speakers:
Griselda Pollock (Centre CATH, University of Leeds) International Feminism as an Exhibition Effect: Visibility and invisibility at Documenta 12, Wack! and Venice 2007
Alison Rowley (University of Ulster) Feminist Adventures Underground
Ruth Noack (Curator of Documenta 12) Who’s Afraid of the Feminist Blockbuster?
Geeta Kapur (Independent Critic and Curator) About Fragility: Historical understanding, difference and the contemporary exhibition effect
Sylvie Simmonds (McGill University, Montreal ) Feminist Works Still Resisting the Archaeological Space of the Museum
Roundtable Discussion: Moving through Locations: International Exhibitions of International Art in Internationally Feminist Perspectives
Session Abstract:
During 2007 a number of major exhibitions took place: two blockbusters in the United States repositioned feminism in the museum (Wack! and Global Feminisms). What is the meaning of this – interment of a past movement or the historical curation of a continuing event in culture? If feminism was given a boost into renewed visibility and respectability by a conference at Museum of Modern Art significantly titled Feminist Future, how were questions of gender and sexual played out by the Venice Biennale, and Documenta 12? Such exhibitions are not reducible to museum, academy or studio. Happening in present time, they challenge art historical analysis to confront ‘the contemporary’ as the contemporaneous: cultural processes both happening in the now and in ways that challenge the will to historical understanding.
In the era of the dominance of the blockbuster exhibition and these critical biennial and cinquiennial events, the temporalities and locations of art making, reception and emplacement in critical discourse are changed with a variety of discourses and practices feeding into and spinning off from the exhibition as event. How powerful are the mobile curatorial teams assembled for these exhibitions? What critical purchase do reviews, responses, engagements with their work have? How are relations between artist, curator and critical thinker fostered, hindered, developed, displaced, relocated by the centrifuge of the event? How do we track the politics of the inevitable repressions, displacements, appropriations? What critical practices and theoretical discourses are included, positioned or disappeared? Will 2007 be remembered for a flutter around a historical feminism on the edges of the art world whose main business resumed with an international agenda unaltered by feminist and other critical theory, or did it mark a significant series of exhibitionary reflections at the intersections of art making, art thinking, art writing that are inclusive and politically creative?