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or biennale themes, but made most explicit in a work that sets another parameter for this papera work that was itself a new instalment, a rep-etition, of an older installation. For upon enter-ing Thomas Hirschhorns Concretion Re (2007), visitors encountered a situation created by many of Hirschhorns large-scale works: an almost-total makeover of the gallery space and the creation of a cramped, chaotic stage of cardboard and packing tape, of mannequins bodies drilled with screws, and of hundreds of photographs taped to walls or displayed in fl uorescent-lit vitrines. These were photographs of people with congenital deformities and of bodies mangled by the carnage in contem-porary Iraqthe horror of which exceeded any-thing presented in Western news broadcastsas well as innumerable install-shots of the initial work that Concretion Re repeated: an installation titled Concretion that Hirschhorn staged in 2006 in the tiny French town of Thiers. And at the entrance to Concretion Re, visitors could take away a photo-copied article by the Franco-Tunisian philosopher Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, an acolyte of Alain Badiou, on what Kacem called Repetition suspended be-tween two Events.4

As with much of Hirschhorns practice, Con-cretion Re seems both conceptually confusing and formally chaotic. Nevertheless, it also sparks signifi cant questions about the relations between artworks, exhibitions and political thematics at a time when institutions like biennales have become the primary mode of cross-cultural engagement in contemporary art. Hirschhorns decision to dissem-inate Kacems discourse about events and repetition within his work is central to these questions, for the text opens the possibility of conceiving Concretion Re not only as a work of repetition but as somehow suspended between two Events. The key questions to ask, then, are: How might we conceive the two Events between which Concretion Re was poten-tially suspended? Indeed, what might we mean by a discourse of events in contemporary art?

Late in 2007, Swedens so-called second city of Gteborg hosted its fourth International Biennial for Contemporary Art, an exhibition ti-tled Rethinking Dissent: On the Limits of Politics and the Possibilities of Resistance. The curators aim was explicitly portentous: to refi gure arts rela-tions to politics amid the controversies of war. Yet despite the implications of its title, the exhibition was curiously familiar in terms of theme and con-tent. As with many of the worlds seemingly innu-merable biennales, triennales and other large-scale exhibitions, Rethinking Dissent interspersed a smattering of local artists among other namessuch as Lida Abdul, Melik Ohanian, Thomas Hirschhornmade internationally recog nisable through previous appearances on these circuits. And contra Terry Smiths claim that a retreat from broad-scale engagement has characterised all biennales after Documenta 111, Rethinking Dissent joined an ever-growing list of such exhibi-tions seeking to tackle directly some of the most infamous and frequently televised of recent world events, and the ways in which those events seem to defi ne what we mean by politics today. That list provides a key parameter for this paper, and includes many signifi cant exhibitions to emerge after Okwui Enwezors Documenta: most nota-bly, Charles Merewethers 2006 Sydney Biennale on Zones of Contact between localised aesthetic engagements and distant confl icts, sites and subjec-tivities; Evelyne Jouannos Emergency Biennale in Chechnya (2005) with its aim to mobilise art-ists to reintroduce Chechnya to an international audience2; and Enwezors fi rst post-Documenta biennale in Seville in 2006, for which he sought strong artistic interventions [in such matters as] the terroristic imagination and especially the sus-pensions of civil liberties and states of exception found in the US-controlled internment camp at Guantnamo Bay.3

The sense of familiarity in Gteborg was not limited to a repetition of certain artists names

192

On the Evental InstallationContemporary Art and Politics of Presence

Anthony Gardner, University of Melbourne

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952 Contemporaneity in Art and Its History

though not exclusively large-scale exhibitions like biennales, as an event that some people (myself included) will cross hemispheres to experience. This conception of exhibition-events is largely driven by the priorities of publicity and threat-ens to reconfi gure curators as event managers. Furthermore, while the exhibition-event draws international audiences to sites often located at the peripheries of the art world, such as Seville, Tirana or Gteborg, attendance requires particular levels of personal and/or institutional funding, and may thus reinforce cultural and class-based divisions between those who can and cannot experience an event. This is a crucial consideration to note and I will return to it shortly.

The second understanding of events relates to the representation of world events and con-fl ict zones through global news broadcasts, the evocation of which has become a central motif in contemporary art. Concretion Res hundreds of photographs of corpses and catastrophes in Iraq provide one example of this resurgent representa-tional trend. We can also think of sincere social documentary and other photograph-based repre-sentations that provide images of world events or their aftermath as modes of alternative journalism, and which have become a staple of recent political exhibitions. These include Baghdad-based Ghaith Abdul-Ahads straight photographs of Iraqs war-torn occupation, Josephine Mecksepers photo-graphs of demonstrations in Berlin, and Pamela Wilson-Ryckmans watercolours drawn from news accounts of tragedyall of which Okwui Enwezor showed alongside many other artistic representa-tions derived from media representations of trau-matic world events in his Seville Biennale. Or, to name two examples installed beside Hirschhorns Concretion Re in Gteborg, Kabul-based Lida Abduls allegorical videos about death and trauma in Afghanistan, and Beirut-based Lamia Joreiges videoed interviews with survivors of Lebanons re-cent wars, the indexicality of which is heightened by the videos projection alongside the personal possessions shown at the beginning of each inter-view and which spark the interviewees subjective accounts of life during the countrys confl icts.

As these examples suggest, there is today an increasing tendency to merge these two kinds of event: to politicise an exhibition-event through re-course to artistic representations of mediatised (and particularly traumatic) world events; and to bring images from the worlds so-called peripheriesoften, but not always, created by artists from those peripheriesto international attention through exhibition-events. This con vergence of events is not surprisingly the legacy of Documenta 11,

One approach is to analyse artworks such as Hirschhorns through philosophical discourses of the event to which Kacems text explicitly points. These discourses articulate events as the rupturing of normalised states of being from within: a rupture that reveals a void within what we have hitherto presumed to be natural, a void that is unnameable because unaccounted for in our normalised states, and whichto quote the great theorist of the event, Kacems mentor Alain Badioucompels us to de-cide a new way of being as a consequence of this destabilising rupture.5 Such discourses have a long philosophical heritage and have regained promi-nence through the generally distinct theorisations of Foucault, Badiou and Deleuze and Guattari.6 Though not quite a new orthodoxy, they have also emerged as central to much contemporary art analy sisalbeit often with a fl ippant disregard for the extreme rarity and profound destabilisa-tion of the event as conceived by theorists such as Badiou.7 These include, for example, Ackbar Abbass claim that Culture as event is non-obvious and surprising, representing a kind of intrusion of something else into the state of things; or Tere Vadn and Mika Hannulas espousal of localised encounters with artworks as eventualisations that provide a certain kind of romanticism that is based on hope. A hope of being able to fi gure out better compromises; or even Bernard Tschumis theory of an architectural event-space that ishowever paradoxical it soundsdesigned for dtournement and unpredictability.8

If I hold a certain scepticism towards some critics treatment of the event as an interdiscipli-nary readymade, whose transference to contempo-rary art reduces the event to a quotidian surprise, I am equally sceptical of claims that Hirschhorns work merely illustrates extant philosophical premises.9 Hirschhorn has frequently rejected this approach, declaring its determination by other dis-ciplines to be a superfi cial engagement with art. His Bataille Monument (2002), for example, is neither a biography nor a depiction of Batailles philoso-phies, but rather a means to examine more press-ing concerns within contemporary practice (such as how to engage people in the service of art rather than delimit art to a service for people, or to test voyeuristic impulses that may emerge when people from different classes and cultures meet). Similarly, I think that Hirschhorns invocation of Kacems two Events is less in keeping with recent French philosophising, and more an attempt to situate Concretion Re within two conceptions of the event that have greater pertinence for contemporary art.

Both arose in this papers anecdotal intro-duction. The fi rst is the exhibition, and particularly


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former edges, for example, has garnered undeni-ably important recognition for previously ignored locales. It has also established opportunities for artists and audiences from across the globe to cross cultures and engage in exchanges during exhibi-tion installation and vernissages. Concurrently, however, such appeals to recognition through exhibition-events maintain the authority of people and institutions that can provide such recognition, creating selective inclusions according to extant markers of recognisability and which markers (as Wu Hung suggestively observes) signify not equal-ity but a longing for contemporaneity on the part of the still-subordinate.13

The longing for presence on the global stage partially explains why exhibition-events are now a major resource used by many state and corporate stake-holders in order to garner recognition. Romania, to cite one of myriad examples, hosted an unprecedented six biennales in the mere twenty months before its EU accessionarguably as a sign of national progress towards EU policy standards and to defl ect ongoing concerns about the Romanian Governments corruption in politics and business.14 Such circumstances are not isolated but part of a broader phenomenon that Latin American critic George Ydice labels the political expediency of culture: that is, the treatment of culture as a resource to promote other, some-times quite problematic, political purposes.15 But I also wonder whether we can invert Ydices key terms and discuss a parallel form of expediency, a cultural expediency of politics, as another example of this longing for contemporaneity: of cultures desire for renewed topicality and relevance amid its supposed lack of quantifi cation and national benefi t, and consequent funding cuts. The ever-burgeoning turn to superfi cial representations of world events in exhibitions, and claims to strong artistic interventions [in such matters as] the terroristic imaginationas though terrorists really cared what occurs within the over-protected sanctum of a gallerythus risk baring arts longing for relevance and social presence even as they seek broad-scale engagement.

The effects of this politics of presence for artists can be equally problematic, especially given the prevalence of alternative journalistic images within exhibition-events like the Seville, Sydney or Gteborg biennales. Such events have proven pivotal to introducing international audiences not only to previously ignored sites, but to artists from previously ignored regions as well. The turn within these exhibitions to subjective accounts and testimonies of specifi c confl icts can also provide signifi cant rejoinders to the kinds of journalistic

Enwezors all-consuming exhibition brimming with documentary media and installations and which remains the most signifi cant event (in all senses of the word) for art in recent decades. This conver-gence of events is unsurprising in another way as well, for both exhibition-events and documentary media presented within them are profoundly and perhaps even ontologically linked. That link is a state that Douglas Crimp noted some thirty years ago, albeit of the very different context of a New Yorkstyle Postmodernism based primarily on photographic imagery and performance: namely, a state of presence that exists at the intersection of the indexical (or the having-been-there) and the theatrical (or the staged).10

We see this most obviously in the installation of documentary media or images based on news feeds: experiences of having been at particular protests or personal testimonies of war, which are designed to be seen, staged and installed for exhi-bition viewers. Presence equally resonates, though slightly differently, through exhibition-events and even installations as well: as a staged state of having-been-there to experience their 3-dimen-sional space and encounter the political and aes-thetic dynamicswhat critics now invariably call the affectsbetween works within the frame of an exhibition-event. These experiences and affects are notoriously diffi cult (perhaps impossible) to re-produce photographically.11 Anecdote, as a strate-gic means to supplement photographys limitations and as an assertion of ones particular encounters, thereby becomes a crucial means for artists, view-ers and critics alike to assert their clout within an economy of presence.

Today, we are witnessing (or, better still, ex-periencing) an amplifi cation of Crimps belief that, because of this state of presence, It can be said quite literally of the art of the seventies that you had to be there.12 Thirty years ago, of course, that meant not just being in the presence of an artwork, but having to be in New York. Presence was in-extricable from the authority of Manhattan and the legitimation it provided. Now, as exhibition-events and representations of world events converge through an institutionalised presence of politics in art, we fi nd that the politics of presence remain as potent as ever, if ultimately more complex. This is not just because arts putative globalisation has replaced privileged centres with privileged vectors and lines of frequent fl ights. Rather, that superfi -cial understanding of decentralisation has induced recurring forms of authority and legitimation that cannot be dissociated from potentially productive responses to art historical problems. The prolif-eration of exhibition-events along the art worlds


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2006 Seville Biennale; in making art politically rather than in representations of world events; and in refl exivity about the limitations of aesthetic poli-tics (such as creating temporary museums in out-lying suburbs), rather than in demands for strong artistic interventions within dominant geopolitical frames.

This process of defl ecting political presence to somewhere else, and towards another under-standing of politics, also emerged in Hirschhorns Concretion Re. The work frequently redirected vision and presence. The surfeit of high-wattage fl uorescent lighting, and its constant refl ection off the ever-present packing tape, made trying to see the photographs content as much an act of avoiding the blinding light shining off them. When Hirschhorns photographs were perceivable, the sheer horror they containedof skin peeled away from faces, of faces grated into bitumen, of shat-tered brains and other extremes of bodily destruc-tionfar exceeded current moulds of altern ative journalism, and induced a different kind of blind-ness: a turning away from the images through the inability to stomach them. And beside each vitrine and display, as though awaiting defl ected gazes, Hirschhorn presented another set of images: mov-ing images of Hirschhorn himself, his lips moving but his voice made inaudible as though rendered mute in the face of these events; and videos taken in the French town of Thiers of the installation that Concretion Re repeated. These videos, alongside the innumerable install-shots of the initial work, thus revealed Concretion Re to be spectral and simulacral, a repetition whose presence lay dislo-cated between its current site in Gteborg and an-other time and place in Thiers.

What this suggests, I think, is that Concretion Re and his earlier repeated work in Seville were knowing counters to the increasing convergence of exhibition-events and images of world events in contemporary art. If this convergence is often intended to assuage an exhibitions (and its hosts) longings for contemporaneity, then Hirschhorn suggested that it can also render artists mute and audiences blinded. Art, perhaps, cannot engage in actual interventions within, or dissent towards, con-temporary geopolitics when encapsulated within contemporary arts notions of events. Hirschhorns installations instead suggested another way of con-ceiving arts politics today: politics that emerged in specifi c relation to, through, and in many ways against, the purposive frames of presence asserted in biennales like Seville or Gteborg, and which were given form as a series of suspensions and redi-rections. These suspensions lay between the pres-ence of political imagery and constant defl ections

reportage seen daily in the news. But that inclusion still leaves open the following question: To whose journalism are these images, and perhaps these artists, supposed to provide alternatives? Similarly, as Catherine David has noted, there is also something very unfortunate, close to obscene about the frequent fusion of an artists biography and the referent of a confl ict zone, particularly through the use and presentation of photographic media.16 For while that referent can underscore the presence of political confl ict within an exhibition-event, it can also reduce individual artists or works to being representative of confl icts, trading on artists presence at world events or, in some cases, legitimating their inclusion in exhibition-events through highly questionable metonymies of national identity and tragedy. Crimps once-cheerful claim that you had to be there may thus no longer be a colloquial declaration but rather a forceful imperative: a politics of presence in the wake of identity politics.

Many contemporary artists have refl exively engaged with such politics in recent years. We can think, for example, of Walid Raads problematisa-tion of presence in artworks suspended between fi ction and fact; or the starkly different notions of presence asserted through a number of Indigenous Australian artists paintings and performances. But I want to conclude this paper by returning to Thomas Hirschhorn and his own refl exive engage-ment with arts politics of presence in recent po-liticised biennales.

In Seville, and unlike many of the artists select-ed by Enwezor, Hirschhorn did not exhibit artistic representations of journalistic images of geopoliti-cal events. Instead, he created Re (2006), a work that was also a kind of repetition: an archive of pho-tographs taken during one of his previous works, the Muse Prcaire Albinet (2004). The Muse Prcaire was a prime exponent of what Hirschhorn calls making art politically as a counter to mak-ing political art: Hirschhorn asked people from Pariss outer suburb of Aubervilliers to help him create a temporary museum there, with artworks borrowed from the Pompidou Museums collec-tion. The Muse thereby presented an aesthetic politics of engaging people and processes (like in-ternships) that art discourse often ignores. By ex-hibiting photographs of this process in Sevilleas well as videos of the Muses participants critically refl ecting on whether that process was indeed politicalHirschhorn suspended Enwezors as-sumptions that arts politics relate primarily to contemporary events in Iraq or Guantnamo Bay. For Hirschhorn, the presence of arts politics lay elsewhere: in Aubervilliers in 2004 rather than the


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3 Okwui Enwezor, The Unhomely, in Okwui Enwezor (ed.), The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society, BIACS, Seville, 2006, esp. pp. 1316. This list could easily be expanded to include the many other exhibitions, large and small, held worldwide in recent years that focus on similar themes.

4 Mehdi Balhej Kacem, Event and Repetition, originally published in Failles, no. 2, spring 2006. Reproduced and disseminated in Thomas Hirsch-horns Concretion Re for Rethinking Dissent.

5 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward, Verso, London, 2001, p. 41.

6 ibid.; see also Michel Foucault et al., Question of Method: An Interview with Michel Foucault, in Kenneth Baynes et al. (eds), After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987, pp. 10017; and Gilles Deleuze & Flix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Graham Burchill, Verso, London, 1994.

7 On the scarcity of Badiouan eventswhich he limits to such circumstances as the French Revolution of 1792, Chinas Cultural Revolution and Schnbergs development of the 12-tone scale in musicsee Badiou, p. 41, n. 5.

8 Ackbar Abbas, Culture as Event in Chinas Socialist Market Economy, in Robert Storr (ed.), Where Art Worlds Meet: Multiple Modernities and the Global Salon, Marsilio, Venice, c. 2006, p. 65; see also Tere Vadn & Mika Hannula, Rock the Boat: Localized Ethics, the Situated Self and Particularism in Contemporary Art, Salon Verlag, Cologne, 2003, p. 157; and Bernard Tschumi & Enrique Walker, Avant-Propos: Bernard Tschumi in Conversation with Enrique Walker, Grey Room, no. 17, fall 2004, pp. 11920.

9 See, for example, claims that Hirschhorns work represents and enacts philosophies of the multitude, a revolutionary entity espoused by the philosopher Antonio Negri, in Stphane Sauzedde, Au centre de loeuvre de Thomas Hirschhorn: La notion de Multitude, Plastik, no. 4, autumn 2004, pp. 13651.

10 Douglas Crimp, Pictures, October, no. 8, spring 1979, pp. 7588. I owe many thanks to Huw Hallam for our numerous discussions on the resonance of Crimps early writings in contemporary art practice.

11 On contemporary arts politico-aesthetic affects, see Jill Bennett, The Dynamic of Resonance: Art, Politics and the Event, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 6, nos 27, 200506, pp. 6781. Note also that a clear and intriguing paradox emerges in relation to arts convergence of events: the experience of installations and exhibition-events are marked by the limitations of photography, and yet world events are presented within the frames of art through that very medium. Word-limit constraints prevent proper analysis here, but what this paradoxical coexistence of presence suggests is the need to re-evaluate Wal ter Benjamins well-known (but arguably dated) oppo-sition between aura and mechanical reproducibility. Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, Fontana, London, 1973, pp. 21751.

12 Crimp, p. 77, n. 10. 13 Wu Hung, untitled commentary in Storr, p. 203, n. 8. 14 Details about the complaints and charges brought

against Romanias former government can be found

of vision away from what was present (whether to spaces marked by blindness, or to the works initial incarnations in Thiers or Aubervilliers); or between the real thing, as Hirschhorn labelled one of his images in Gteborg, and repetitions that were self-consciously simulacral. In other words, these were suspensions in which the staged and the indexical, as well as global politics and sophistic engagements with them, constantly fought against each other rather than folded into each other. As a consequence, and as was especially the case in Seville, Hirschhorns works sought to direct atten-tion away from the biennales literal illustration of world events, and their determination of what arts politics might be, so as to present examples of aesthetic politicsof making art politicallythat lay beyond the biennales parameters.

These works were thus attempts to suspend or even rupture the emergent conventions of politi-cised aesthetics, and to reconsider what is voided by those conventions: on the one hand, arts gen-eral inability to resist, let alone redirect, contem-porary world events, and on the other, the ongoing importance of institutional critique. This was not in terms of disrupting museums architectural forms (prevalent since the 1970s), but of re-evaluating the various purposes underwriting arts politics or an artworks presence amid contemporary wars and curatorial sophistrythat is, not simply site-specifi c critiques, but purpose-specifi c critiques particular to each artist and each exhibition-event. It would be easy to term these installations rup-tures of conventions evental in the philosophical senseas we can recall, this is one way of inter-preting events today. But Hirschhorn somewhat less portentously describes it as arts political au-tonomy17: not in the Greenbergian sense of art vacuum-sealed from the everyday, but as arts ca-pacity to work through and defuse the need for political legitimation determined by other sources. This is a conception of autonomy that has long underpinned Hirschhorns refusal to illustrate con-temporary political events, and which, in recent years, has sat suspended between such events and the event of exhibitions, between the indexical and the staged, and alongside arts longingshowever earnest or expedient they may befor contempo-raneity and presence.

NOTES

1 Terry Smith, Biennales in the Conditions of Con-temporaneity, Art and Australia, vol. 42, no. 3, autumn 2005, p. 414.

2 Evelyne Jouanno, Emergency Biennale in Chechnya, www.emergency-biennale.org/project.htm, viewed 9 August 2007.



Curating Beirut: A Conversation on the Politics of Representation, Art Journal, vol. 66, no. 2, summer 2007, p. 100.

17 Thomas Hirschhorn, Dis Pourquoi?! Dis Pourquoi?!, Cahiers du Muse National dArt Moderne, no. 100, summer 2007, pp. 11516.

in Romania: Human Rights Developments, Human Rights Watch World Report 2001, Human Rights Watch, New York, 2001, pp. 3089.

15 George Ydice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2003.

16 Catherine David, in Sandra Dagher, Catherine David, Rasha Salti, Christine Tohme & TJ Demos,


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