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In medias res

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Abstract

As contemporary artistic practice has become ever more polymorphous and multispatial, large scale exhibitions have accommodated a wider array of emerging nonmodern epistemologies, materialities, and temporalities ‘in the middle’ (Latour, 1993, 47). As a critical means of considering contemporary art’s homologous nonmodern, this paper refracts two influential global exhibitions of contemporary art – dOCUMENTA (13) and Il Palazzo Encyclopedia – through the lens of Medievalisms Studies. Medievalisms Studies’ challenge to the ‘simplified binarization of premodern acts and modern identities’ (Fradenburg, 1997, 213) invites deeper scrutiny of contemporary art’s knowledges, materialities, and chronopolitics. Developing the medievalist analogies of the compendium and the relic, I focus on specific exempla presented within the curatorial frameworks of two key biennale that offer a macrocosmic discourse on contemporary art’s developing relations with knowledges, materials, and time. In unfolding anachronic materialist narratives, a nonmodern sensibility promised to liberate emerging art from the social constructivist paradigms that still dominate contemporary art. As a corollary of their nonmodern materialist epistemologies, the biennale that form my exempla also attempted to (dis)place the practices they curated through a polytemporality in which now-and-then and here-and-there are intertwined.

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Notes

  1. Residual medievalisms contrast with what Alexander Nagel calls ‘instances of deliberate medievalism’ found in modernism (Nagel, 2012, 22). I will adapt Prendergast and Trigg’s neologism ‘medievalization’ to similar ends, considering ‘deliberate’ medievalisms as ‘theory-fictions that facilitate ludic speculation on nonmodern futurities’ (Confraternity of Neoflagellants, 2013).

  2. This is equally evident in Medievalisms Studies. For example, in Getting Medieval, Carolyn Dinshaw performed a premodern/postmodern comparative studies vis a vis sexuality (Dinshaw, 1999).

  3. Founded by Marieke van Hal in 2009, the supranational International Biennale Association (www.biennialfoundation.org) has solicited the establishment of Biennology, the scholarly study of large-scale international exhibitions. See Kompatsiaris (2017) and Seismopolite (2013).

  4. dOCUMENTA is a ‘massive, temporally and geographically dispersed event’ […] that it is ‘far beyond the ability of any one spectator to behold’ (Masters, 2012, 128). dOCUMENTA 13, for example, granted its bulla to Alexandria (Egypt), Banff (Canada), and Kabul (Afghanistan) as its sanctioned sites of artistic pilgrimage, anointing them in its mappa mundi as a constituent part of its own domain. In International Relations, such supranational territorialisation is considered a quintessentially neomedieval bid for overlordship (Friedrichs, 2001).

  5. In this, Gioni extends the dialogue between the new museology and the practices of ‘museological art’ in the 1990s. See Vergo (1989); Weschler (1996); and McShine (1999).

  6. ‘It best reflects the giant scope of this international exhibition,’ Gioni said, ‘the impossibility of capturing the sheer enormity of the art world today’ (Vogel, 2013).

  7. See The LongNow Foundation website (longnow.org).

  8. Artists featured include Ed Atkins, Louise Bourgeois, Prunella Clough, John Gerrard, Robert Gober, Nicola Hicks, Roger Hiorns, Alex Hubbard, Dwight Mackintosh, Pierre Molinier, James Rosenquist, Jim Shaw, William Blake, John Tenniel, and Tøyen.

  9. An example of object-biography in practice drawn from the broader 2013 Venice Biennale is the Catalonian national Pavillion 25%, a project curated by curator Jordi Balló, artist Francesc Torres, and filmmaker Mercedes Álvarez in association with the MACBA (Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona). Herein eight unemployed Catalans each chose a work from the MACBA permanent collection. By engaging with the making, use, and future life of their chosen object, they articulate their own subjects of inquiry.

  10. See Dickie (1997) and Becker (1982).

  11. Danto’s take on the veneration of the neodada readymade in the early 1960s is akin to the logic of relic-ing (Danto, 1964). His loaded use of the medievalism ‘transfiguration’ as a heuristic is a medievalization that invokes the social processes that elevated things into authenticated relics. Interestingly, Nagel inverts Danto’s speculative axiom, proposing that ‘The relic’s structural role in the medieval image economy […] comes into view differently when the logic of the readymade is brought to bear on the question’ (Nagel, 2012, 22).

  12. See also Hahn (2012 and 2017).

  13. This, in itself, can be regarded as an operational bias in relation to the broader contemporaneous debates within the new materialisms. For example, rather than foreground the way in which things withdraw, art exhibitions such as dOCUMENTA(13) continued to emphasise the way in which they are entangled.

  14. An influential example of social constructivism was relational aesthetics, ‘a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space’ (Bourriaud, 1998, 113).

  15. Given that contemporary art is a field so frequently dedicated to promoting human exceptionalism, it is unsurprising that it proved difficult for biennale to pass themselves off as actors of no fixed ontology.

  16. See Anselm Franke’s Animism. Exhibition, Conference, 16 March–6 May 2012, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) Berlin; and Nicolas Bourriaud’s The Great Acceleration: Art in the Anthropocene, Taipei Biennial 2014.

  17. Similarly, the medievalist Jeffrey Cohen argued that ‘human identity has always depended upon and been sustained by dispersive networks of actors and objects, meshworks that prevent the human from ever possessing a finite form, an unchanging ontology, a diminutive boundlessness’ (Cohen, 2010, 58).

  18. Nagel wisely cautions here against only seeing continuities: ‘The object is not to deepen the register of historical influences or to retrieve a new set of legitimising precursors for modern practice, thus rendering it traditional and familiar after all, but to activate a wider set of reference points that cannot be arranged chronologically. The practitioners of modern art themselves provided some good tools for dealing with these relationships’ (Nagel, 2012, 22).

  19. ‘The alterity of the Middle Ages continues to secure, for modernity, its intelligibility to itself’ (Fradenburg, 1997, 211).

  20. Preposterous in so far as the ‘authentic’ is a decidedly modern form of presentism, for ‘there was no conceptual room for forgery in a copy culture’ (Nagel, 2012, 235).

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    Neil Mulholland

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Mulholland, N. In medias res. Postmedieval 10, 388–407 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00131-1

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