of Cybernetic Meadows?
By Sofía Dourron/independent curator
This essay responds to an invitation to write about and around the group exhibition Private Song 1, on view at Doosan Gallery, Seoul, from July 22 to August 19, 2020.
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The politics of exhibition-making have been a topic of discussion for decades, especially since the rapid expansion of the curatorial field and the rise of the curator’s figure in media and the public eye. Questions have been raised around production, displays, distribution, and the complicated relations between curators, artists, institutions, and audiences. This text explores the question of group exhibitions, collective decision-making, and my own initial attempt at exerting ecological thought in the arts.
In an essay from the early 2000s curator Ralph Rugoff recounts how, when questioning an artist on what makes a group exhibition “engaging and stimulating”, he received a surprisingly simple answer: “All you have to do is show some really good works of art together.” Such a straightforward statement is hardly something anyone could dare, or care, to disagree with. However, Rugoff writes, lining a group of objectively wonderful works of art in the same room is a bit like listening to the Top 40 on the radio: a bunch of songs mashed together for no apparent reason. Although it is irrefutable that a group show, or any type of art exhibition for that matter, should be made up of great artworks, individual merit does not automatically result in collective greatness. On the contrary, according to Rugoff, “it gives you nothing else to do, in the end, but stand there and admire how marvelous it all is.” This experience can be somewhat underwhelming for an engaged audience who paid for a ticket to see it. What, then, makes a group exhibition great? According to Rugoff, a great group exhibition is one that asks the audience to draw connections between the works – between its parts, that is. Like an orgy, he says, or putting together a large puzzle.
By appealing to the puzzle-orgy analogy, Rugoff is arguing that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; it is not so much about individual artworks but the whole they together make up. We have all heard this run-of-the-mill phrase being thrown around in all sorts of arguments about global warming, populism, modern art theory, theoretical physics, and lately herd immunity, and so on. The chances are that we have even made use of it at some point. Philosopher Timothy Morton, suggests that we have been swallowing this phrase, and allowing it to back scientific and political action, without ever really stopping to reflect on it. He argues: “there is always a multiplicity of parts that exceed the whole, rather than the whole swallowing all the parts perfectly.” Every whole is made of tiny parts, that are made of tiny parts, that are made of tiny parts, until we can’t really see the next tiny part. This ever-increasing number of parts can’t possibly be smaller than the whole, and therefore, wholes are less than the sum of their parts.
This key element for Morton’s ecological thought and the object ontology that drives it also seems to be helpful when thinking about exhibition-making and our experiences of art. If we transport this ecological thought to exhibition making, then, the parts – in our case the artworks – can’t be reduced, or to use Morton’s word, subscended to the whole, i.e. the exhibition. And much like artworks, which can’t be reduced to their parts—material or conceptual—the exhibition can’t be reduced to its parts, the artworks: they are ontologically equal and their meanings are not exhausted in each other, even if they appear to do so to the human eye. In his essay “The Third Table” Graham Harman states that objects, whatever their kind, and this includes artworks and art exhibitions as well as tables, can’t ever be fully accessed. We can’t rely on naming their components (the physics table) and we can’t just describe their effects or actions (the humanities table). According to Harman, the third table lies in between. It is a table we can only know partially and indirectly. Harman adds it is the arts, together with philosophy, that has the most advantageous position from which to access objects, because it naturally challenges their meanings and our interpretations of them. Knowledge, then, turns out to be elusive, and allusive or even metaphorical at its best. This, as Harman tells us in some of his lectures, can result in poetic gibberish or pretension, but pretension is, nonetheless, an inherent risk of humanity.
Trying to eliminate that risk, as much as we attempt to do so, might, in the end, eliminate art itself. There is a tendency in western societies, though, to strive for neutrality, objectivity, cleanliness: a hygienist approach to information, its interpretations, and therefore, to the actions that result from them. According to Morton, this is an on-going attempt to smooth over the ontological gap that separates parts from wholes: an ad nauseam gap, we could call it. Connections between parts are rarely smooth or straight; they take detours, run into bumps, and fall into potholes. Smooth objectivity, as attractive as it is, might turn out to be a human fiction that makes the world easier to swallow, that is, easier for those with the power to create fictions and make other swallow them.
We tend to believe that technology is the carrier of this sought-after objectivity. As the poem says, we all long to be watched over by machines of loving grace.
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
Whether ironic observation or straightforward expression of desire, Brautigan's poem creates an image for human trust in certain technologies, trust that they can do no harm, because they are as pure as water, as innocent a spinning blossoms. This is a common belief that is usually applied to data sets and algorithms as the most efficient tool for problem solving beyond human subjectivity. They are thought of as neutral tools that can forward decision making devoid of bias. Maybe even a good tool to stop curators from playing power games, or including their love interests in large scale international exhibitions. However, as most specialists will point out, machine-learning algorithms are not a biblical miracle of self-creation, and, furthermore, they are not autonomous beings shielded from human intervention. They are created and fed by programmers, engineers, designers, tech-professionals, and a vast array of unsuspecting users who pour their hearts, souls, and desires into webs and apps. That means bias and subjectivity, far from being absent, are deeply engrained in them. That is, machines are far more human than we would care for.
Not only can algorithms and data sets express bias, they can disseminate all sorts of discrimination, and fragmented interpretations of the world, depending on the data they are being fed. As data analyst Cathy O’Neill points out, recalling her experiences in the mysterious world of finances:
The math-powered applications powering the data economy were based on choices made by fallible human beings. Some of these choices were no doubt made with the best intentions. Nevertheless, many of these models encoded human prejudice, misunderstanding, and bias into the software systems that increasingly managed our lives. Like gods, these mathematical models were opaque, their workings invisible to all but the highest priests in their domain: mathematicians and computer scientists.
As we know, this can result not only in a world-crumbling financial crisis, but also in racial profiling by government agencies and police, gender inequalities, political targeting, and even, as was the case in the province of Salta, Argentina, an attempt to predict teenage pregnancy based on economic conditions, which in turn resulted in the ban of legal abortion. However, while machine-learning technologies do offer new and greener cybernetic meadows for unexpected developments, the path to smooth prediction and selection processes proves itself as complicated, and affectively intricate as other systems deemed flawed or inadequate. It seems that, just like human beings, data sets also need some very urgent decolonization.
It is all too evident that art institutions have been essential to the reproduction of colonial and patriarchal structures of power, exclusion, and discrimination, and that a much needed transformation of the art system has slowly been infiltrating it for years. Deviant institutions and independent art initiatives all across the world have for decades been engaging in dissident practices against the grain of traditional white, finance-driven institutions. Some of them do so by engaging with a locality, working with communities, championing representation and inclusion, fostering care, participating in the construction of alternative epistemologies and forms of knowledge production, and creating a more democratic access to art, for both the art community and its audiences. They do so by challenging existing modes of institutionality, by working collectively and ecologically, and by exercising democratic values that enhance solidarity and equality. Others, on the contrary, continue, willingly or otherwise, to reproduce individualistic, colonial, and capitalist forms of decision-making, even when trying to veer towards collectivity. So when questioning the politics of art, its flaws, and its complicated entanglements with every sphere of life, both public and private, it would seem that we should do so not by reproducing mandatory and hygienic individualism against collective consciousness, using the same methods that deflate our consciousness in the first place, but by defying them. We could start by thinking ecologically about the people and the objects we work with.