When Germano Celant talked about the proliferation of exhibitionism and the spectacularization of art

In order to remember the figure of Germano Celant, the art critic who passed away last April 29 in Milan, rather than rely on the genre of homage, we preferred to go back to the long bibliography of the “inventor” of Arte Povera to find pages that could still be topical and offer them to our audience. Among the many that can be reread, we chose the introduction of the essay A Virtual Machine. L’allestimento d’arte e i suoi archetipi moderni, published in 1982, in Italian, in issue IV of the magazine Rassegna, and in English, in the same year, in the catalog of the seventh edition of Documenta. In this essay, Celant traced the history of art exhibition layouts, starting from the early twentieth century and arriving at the present day. In introducing his reconnaissance, the Genoese critic did not shy away from photographing a present made up of a tendency toward “exhibitionism” and an art more interested in appearing than in addressing substantive issues.

Germano Celant

In the span of a decade, art and architecture have been transformed from producers of illusions to receptacles of illusion. Rather than putting forward subjects for contemplation and representation, they have preferred the pleasure of being admired and effigyed. The role has been reversed; instead of allowing spaces and images to be seen and perceived, to thus turn out to be mediating tools toward the real, art and architecture allow themselves to be seen. They focus on their own appearance and superficiality every glance and translate themselves into the spectacle of a cultural existence, whose reality unfolds not so much in the concrete proceeding as in the theatrical, so as to make themselves identical to backdrops and facades.

No longer working on the detection of visual and environmental deceptions, they have become works of deception, where theirreal and the represented stand in place of the substantive mode of being. And since the choice tends toward inauthenticity, it could be said that art and architecture are proposing themselves as ready-made: linguistic operations already made, whose only justification for existing lies in simple presence rather than in the complex deconstruction and discussion of their own languages. The ongoing process is thus one of autosuggestion: we rewind into ourselves with the justification of ananalysis of the past and historical flux. On the contrary, the situation is one of declaring oneself external to one’s making, absolute heroes of a proceeding that (like all narcissistic behavior) dies of illusion and glorifies itself in the illusion of mirroring itself, at least in theIdea.

But we all know that thought cannot save itself other than in practice, and since the only one left, in this historical condition, is that of the exaltation of what does not exist, the system of art and architecture has invented the flight into ideal territory, where languages live an illusory condition, based on the thunderbolts and revelations of a culture to come.

We are in the midst of the ceremonial path: the disguise and power of the image, sources of a future, almost otherworldly figuration, counts here. The memory of idealism, of nostalgic ancestry, is not far away, and it is here that the ephemeral aspect of the spectacle takes force. This keeps alive and sustains the idea of an operational identity and a cataloguing of the totality of processes, which have, however, disappeared. What is produced then is a succession of vedettes that stimulate desire but do not satisfy needs. In fact, they suffice only for themselves, since pleasure comes from being recognized, that is, from being shown.

Through the exhibition, the phenomenon of appearance builds itself a real territory, takes the floor to assume or affirm as already finished any concrete issue. The drawn or painted surface, the sketched project and the model replace the building, as if the drafting of a watercolor or in graphite or plywood prevailed over the making. This proceeding, the elephantiasis of which has erupted in the last decade, has been assumed with the alibi of creative and unproductive negation of architecture. Now, art and architecture have always exalted themselves in negation, but this was of a problematic order, it could correspond to a crisis of the public or personal function of architecture, but it was not a vehicle for showmanship and consumerism. In fact, the proliferation of exhibitionism by public institutions tends to affirm the appearance of making, so the negation of the artistic and architectural act proves conducive to a practice that lives on manifestation, on a process that has no end or purpose other than itself.

The current economy of culture lives on this system, where the main product is showing and showing itself. With the prevalence of exhibition over activity, art and architecture are being formulated according to the spectacular, often thematic demands of museums, galleries, publishers and magazines, Biennials and Triennials. Practice gives way to a construction of images and projects, whose raison d’être is to prove the existence of art and architecture as thoughts that have lost their agent function.

Public apparatuses show that languages exist, but they push them more and more to express themselves in the form of written and drawn, painted and modeled communication. So that they are seen, but manifest no effect except to be shown. Their occupation is thus to exist as cultural goods to be consumed on the surface: on wall, page and screen.

Laction is likewise accompanied by a cultural divism, which sees in the display ceremony the social value, where everything is suspended in anticipation of theacclamation. The result is a quest to perfect makeup and make-up, where the mask dominates over the lived experience. It is the principle of the facade, where structural articulation finds itself replaced by an image that exists above and at the same time makes itself known as the only reality. This development, which submits the actor to the backdrop, transfers all the value of the research to the method of its spectacularization. If the formulation of intentions becomes essential, the real force becomes the expository technique. Now, if the content lies in the form of the exposition and the demonstration is entrusted to the manner in which it is shown, the claimant to alloriginality becomes the visual machine of the display

Calculated as a “service,” with and on which to construct a series of paradigms that set the reading of the work, the display with the different philosophies of showing is assumed to be a “text,” a linguistic place where art and architecture occupy a real role in social life. Evidently, the conditions of exhibition creation are by no means identical to either art or architecture, they live on both since the method of exhibition must, through the organization of space and the composition of visual materials, provide a “plastic” spectacle.However, the articulation of the staging, the driving element of exhibition, differs, so that it represents in itself a form of modern work, in which the text (spatial and visual) plays an important part. If this is true, it seems time to consider it from both scientific and historical perspectives. Interest in its application, however, does not prompt imposing it as the sole definition, but rather recognizing it as a terrain of communication and specifying it in the form of a “discipline of showing.”

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