Ferguson suggests that while art objects and art institutions have been regularly examined and critiqued within contemporary critical enquiry, the practices and effects of exhibition-making have remained mostly invisible. And yet, they are crucial to an understanding of the politics of representation in our culture, and indeed central to our understanding of contemporary art.
The ‘cultural industries’ identified by Adorno and Horkheimer, can now be seen as part of the broader ‘consciousness industries’ (characterized by Hans Enzberger to include advertising, education and ‘infotainment’) and these are contemporary forms, Ferguson suggests, of traditional rhetoric. Every element of an exhibition has a strategic function, with political, psychological, ideological, socio-historical and structural ramifications.
Ferguson argues that all exhibitionary procedures – from labels to lighting - are part of the exhibition’s ‘active recitation.’ The institution operates from within a network of influences, and its unconscious ‘desires’ are unintentionally communicated. Ferguson speculates, with deliberate anthropomorphism, that the exhibition can be seen as “the material speech of an essentially political institution”. “The building, its agents and its projects combine to produce what might be called a character – the speaking and performing body by which it is known and judged, seen and heard.”
The key question for Ferguson’s essentially post-structural analysis is the extent to which exhibitions resist an illusory ‘affirmative narrative’ and admit to their institution’s complex multiplicities and contradictions. “Otherwise the exhibition as a speech performance, will remain a loud monologue followed by a long silence […]”
Kirstie Skinner