Poor Space

In schematizing the poor space, the intention is to envision it as a locus of disobedience, ambiguous as well as potentially ambivalent, performing non-totalizing gestures in place of the authoritarian impulse.

Steven Henry Madoff • 10/21/25

• Abstract

  Critical Curating is The Curatorial’s section devoted to more theoretically oriented considerations of curatorial research and practice. While of a specialized nature, we seek essays for this section that are written for a broadly engaged intellectual audience interested in curating’s philosophical, historical, aesthetic, political, and social tenets, as well as a labor-based activity and its ramifications.

  In this essay, Steven Henry Madoff extrapolates from Hito Steyerl’s notion of the “poor image,” which she proposed in her essay, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” that appeared in e-flux Journal in November 2009. Steyerl wrote about the potential for low-resolution images on the internet to democratize image-making and the global distribution of images (though with caveats). Madoff takes the beneficial character of low resolution as a way to speak about a curatorial strategy that deploys a lack of transparency as a way to address political issues indirectly. He considers related means to accomplish political resistance through redirection, such as the uses of metaphor and allegory, as well as Guy Debord’s notion of the dérive and Edouard Glissant’s promotion of “opacity.” Madoff suggests that such tactical ways of curating may be of increasing importance as authoritarian regimes spread internationally. 

  This essay, in a different version, was presented as a talk in Riga, Latvia, at the symposium “Eastern European Curatorial Practices: Historical Development and Challenges” held in September 2025.

If this is the new era of artificial intelligence, it’s also the old era, or rather the renewed era, of authoritarianism. Where I come from, New York, the city has never felt more like a bubble in a country whose democracy has never felt more like a punching bag. If Americans are now being shocked on a daily basis by the new regime, we have a lot to learn from Eastern Europe, among other regions of the world, about what is coming, let alone what is here already, and how to respond. And while artificial intelligence is also bringing increasing disruptions to our world, in the context of curating and the wider scope of the curatorial, I can’t say it has made fundamental shifts in the way curators work. Not yet, at least. And so, questions about the impact on the curatorial field under the clouds of authoritarianism, about which Eastern European geopolitics offer historical lessons, are pressing on me as an American, while I certainly have ideas about what technological advancements will bring.

The uproar around AI’s generative image-making and the fear that advanced computation is approaching consciousness and autonomy are as yet unfounded and are, for now, a distraction from the urgent issues of our time, with rising authoritarianism, genocide, climate change, immigration crises, and economic precarity all tipping us toward darkness. I won’t digress further about AI (and yes, there are relatively near-term scenarios in which AI is a baby with a gun), but at the moment it is most practical to say that the ways in which artists and curators are thinking about, producing, and exhibiting algorithmic art are still topical, not truly fundamental to the renovation of our artistic, cultural or political conditions—and, in any case, this kind of work lies along a continuum in an artistic tradition of fascination with machines, not a consciousness of machines fascinated with us.

Still, why I think it’s useful to bring up generative AI image-making here is that its way of shredding and diffusing vast numbers of images to make other images—though, for the most part, visually banal, anodyne, or toxic ones—presents a model of ontological decentering, a collapse of origin, an endless robbery and reshaping that violates and empties authorship yet promises unparalleled possibilities of a democratized and fugitive form of making that links directly to a techno-political condition already diagnosed by Hito Steyerl in her famous 2009 essay, “In Defense of the Poor Image.”1 Steyerl proposed that globally circulated, continually copied and regenerated low-quality digital imagery, while technically degraded and dangerously instrumentalized, also has a high social quotient of democratizing influence, of upgraded mobility, and therefore stands as a political signifier and activator of an alternative political economy—at once low-resolution and high-potential for creative work in the face of hierarchical power.

So, she writes: “The networks in which poor images circulate thus constitute both a platform for a fragile new common interest and a battleground for commercial and national agendas. They contain experimental and artistic material, but also incredible amounts of porn and paranoia. While the territory of poor images allows access to excluded imagery, it is also permeated by the most advanced commodification techniques.” And later in the essay, she concludes: “The circulation of poor images feeds into both capitalist media assembly lines and alternative audiovisual economies. In addition to a lot of confusion and stupefaction, it also possibly creates disruptive movements of thought and affect.”

It seems to me that what she diagnosed with the poor image as an online phenomenon seeping into the world reflects what we have now with AI as a sign of displacement that only amplifies the condition of the poor image and offers a way to think about curatorial work as well. So, let me, for the moment, call it the “poor space” of curating, which has nothing to do with budgets or scale, but as a tactical way of thinking about curatorial making in the stifling atmosphere today of political intimidation and restriction.2 Irony and cunning are the way of the poor space—something I know is familiar to an Eastern European artistic sensibility, while I might also add to this the notion of the dérive, Guy Debord’s Situationist proposition of political parcours, of the roundabout way to get where you want to go as a form of trickster liberation.

Just as the lexicon found in The Curatorial includes the terms “curating” and “the curatorial,” in which “the curatorial” designates a broad conceptual framework for acts of curating—you might say, a socio-political surround in which curating takes place—the “poor space” is a surround for curating in its symbolic mode of misdirection-as-redirection.3 As a token of this idea of the poor space, I think of an image of near-emptiness. The image is of Ryan Gander’s I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorize (The Invisible Pull) (2012), a work that was almost no work at all, consisting of nothing more than a slight breeze in a nearly empty gallery space just to the left as you entered the Fridericianum at the time of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s documenta (13) in 2012. Along with it, there were four objects, barely noticeable at first: three slender sculptures by Julio González in a narrow vitrine, which had already been installed in the same place at documenta 2 in 1959, and a letter of refusal by Kai Althoff—a participation by refusing to participate that in turn echoed, almost like the breeze in the room, Robert Morris’s actual refusal to participate forty years earlier in documenta 5.

Ryan Gander, I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorize (The Invisible Pull) (2012).

I’d like to use this image as a lever, a curatorial generator to produce a specifically unspecific way in which the curatorial poor space, poor gallery, poor room deploys its subject as a kind of dérive, or what in literature are the devices of metaphor and allegory. Metaphor, as I’ve written elsewhere, affords an artificial pleasure of purposeful distance; it is a way to accommodate ourselves to the brute intractability of the world by shifting appearances.4 At the same time, the allegorical impulse, as Craig Owens noted long ago (and that is instrumental in the activation of the poor space), is restorative through its superimposition of one meaning on another—a form of replacement to empty out the authority it seeks to detour, deflate, deflect, or decline. Allegory, by its substitutive nature, intends to supersede or revoke, but also to make apparent again. Or, as Owens remarks, “In allegorical structure, then, one text is read through another.”5

The emptiness that Gander’s work deploys also carries the ghost of another moment in the history of art that speaks in the language of metaphor and allegory in order to insulate itself, to rebuff and ironize governmental oppression: the moment of the Moscow Conceptualists in the 1970s and ’80s as the Soviet Union slowly ran its great ship into the shoals of its exhaustion. So, Ilya Kabakov wrote about the local art of his contemporaries: “This contiguity, closeness, touchingness, contact with nothing, emptiness makes up, we feel, the basic peculiarity of ‘Russian conceptualism’... It is like something that hangs in the air, a self-reliant thing, like a fantastic construction, connected to nothing, with its roots in nothing...”6 Kabakov’s work, along with those of Komar and Melamid, Irina Nakhova, and others, through slogans, paintings, and installations, addressed the voice of monolithic Soviet inflationary self-regard to satirize, allegorize, puncture, and relieve it of its authority. If a famous work by Kabakov, his 1989 allegorical installation titled The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment, is the material opposite of Gander’s empty room, presenting a mad overload of propagandist images that symbolize the burden of Soviet life, they are both imaginaries of escape from oppressive weight.

Ilya Kabakov, The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, 1985, mixed media, installation view, 2017. Photo: Andrew Dunkley.

This mode of desolidification through metaphor and allegory, through an emptiness that is not, is emblematic of what the poor space offers, shifting the blunt facts of the world through symbolic relations. They do so precisely to bring us around from another side, a dérive. George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” that writing politically may “vary from party to party, but [it is] all alike in that one almost never finds in [it] a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech.”7 Yet the value of the poor space is its curatorial status as a platform that reorients and re-presents, often in a local register, and that, as with allegory’s implicit humor, slyness, ironies, and slipperiness, illuminates ways around the politics of oppression and displacement by way of displacement, bringing something vivid and fresh.

The very idea of a situated form of expression that deploys oblique means toward a revised and revived language of critique is recalled in other Eastern European actions, particularly what have been called “monstrations,” as Zdenka Badovinac recounts in her book, Unannounced Voices: Curatorial Practice and Changing Institutions. There, she notes Andrei Monastyrsky’s Collective Actions Group, active from the mid-1970s, along with the Russian philosopher Alexei Yurchak’s reflections on the Slovenian art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), begun in the 1980s. In relation to NSK’s work, he speaks of “monstrations”—a word that conflates “demonstration” and “monsters”—and he remarks that “participants in monstrations carry signs with apparently ‘absurd, meaningless and disconnected slogans.’” Wonderfully off-kilter examples include: “We support same-sex fights” and “I demand meaningful slogans.” These forms of performative illogic illustrate a rhetorical strategy that, as an artistic and curatorial action, seems at first “utterly apolitical and nothing more than a meaningful carnival,” as Yurchak observes. “However, the closer scrutiny shows that monstrations [are] a powerful form of political critique in the context of late-Putin rule.”8

Collective Actions Group, Slogan (January 26, 1977). The text reads: “I DO NOT COMPLAIN ABOUT ANYTHING AND I ALMOST LIKE IT HERE, ALTHOUGH I HAVE NEVER BEEN HERE BEFORE AND KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THIS PLACE.” A quote from Andrei Monastyrski’s 1976 poem, “Nothing Happens,” a key text for the Moscow Conceptualists.

Such performative renderings exemplify the ambitions of the poor space to wriggle free from the vise of authoritarian restrictions by means of linguistic and apparently counter-rational modes of expression—a vividness accomplished through illegibility and deracination. The poor space is not fixed in its location, and it is intellectually permeable. It doesn’t necessarily seek reparations so much as it reroutes the rhetorical bounds of the regime, disarticulating its elocutions of power. The poor space isn’t necessarily about or driven by collectivity, but it is, by shrewdness and perhaps at times by luck, a space of infection and, therefore, of democratizing distribution. It offers the possibility, in Gayatri Spivak’s phrase, of “affirmative sabotage.”

In this regard of artistic and curatorial moves of misdirection-as-redirection, of illicitness, of willful illegibility in the face of juridical scrutiny, I think as well of Philippe Pirotte’s Montreal Biennale in 2016, into which he curated Corey McCorkle’s Monument (2013), a video projection of a blind horse that could only be viewed in the dark and at night, the constraint on seeing proposed as a way to perceive against the odds, against the grain. Empathy, or imaginary transfer, from one housing of perception, the blind horse, to another, the human, encourages this action, performing this nightshift that proposes another way to see out of need.

Corey McCorkle, Monument, 2013, HD projection, 5 min., 36 sec., Montréal Biennale, 2016, at La Station, former gasoline station designed by Mies Van der Rohe, Ile des Soeurs, Montréal.

Following directly from the tension of this nocturnal frame of emancipatory obliqueness, there is Pirotte’s Busan Biennale last year to consider. Titled Seeing in the Dark, its basic premise was this sidelong approach to political address as a form of deviation and cunning. One example of this was Pirotte’s inclusion of the work Hail (2020), by Lee Yanghee, picturing South Korea’s underground rave scene in the early 2000s and calling up metaphors of formal and alternative dance, altered archetypes, queerness, and bodily pleasure that countermands public restriction.

Lee Yanghee, Hail, 2020, 4-channel video, 6-channel audio, 15 min., 46 sec., Busan Biennale, “Seeing in the Dark,” 2024.

Of course, writing this within the context of Eastern European cultural-political practices, it is all too clear that there is a need for strategies of the dark, so to speak; for a rhetorical commons of the oblique; an artistic economy dedicated to gestures of displacement that can thrive in the shadows of authoritarianism as a means of survival, or what Judith Butler has spoken of as the will to “to minimize the unlivability of lives,” which, once again, is our current challenge.9

What the use of the term “poor space” helps me to emphasize is that an exhibition made with this kind of strategy usefully decenters its subject, shifting authoritarian gravity, and just as Pirotte did in Busan, it wears the cloak of Édouard Glissant’s idea of opacity as resistance, as beneficial ambiguity.10 As well, this is what the political theorist James Scott noted in his idea of the public transcript and the hidden transcript, where the public transcript is visible and therefore can be controlled, shut down, even erased, while the hidden transcript is illicit, mobile, subversive.11 And in turn, opacity and the hidden transcript echo in Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s proposition of “fugitive planning,” about which they write: “To enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts.”12 Those words perfectly correspond with Steyerl’s claim that the poor image “creates disruptive movements of thought and affect.”

Zasha Colah, in her 2025 curation of the Berlin Biennale, invoked a similar dérive, titling her exhibition “passing the fugitive on,” taking the figure of foxes shifting through the cityscape of Berlin as a tutelary spirit under the siege of contemporary life that symbolizes, as she put it, “the cultural ability of a work of art to set its own laws, in the face of lawful violence.”13 She calls this, as an active verb, “foxing,” and speaks of these moves as a fugitive way, a potent illegality, that traverses injustice. Of course, not every proclamation of rebellious fugitivity is successful, and the structural contradictions of a government-funded “foxing” exhibition in Germany, with the imposition that some subjects cannot be discussed (and weren’t), complicates and diminishes any actual action intended to outfox those very restraints.

Berlin Biennale logo, 2025.

Nonetheless, in schematizing the poor space, the intention is to envision it as a locus of disobedience, one that may well be both ambiguous and ambivalent, performing non-totalizing gestures in place of the authoritarian impulse. This helps us to see that the counter-narrative of the poor space is one of recalibration and disequilibration by intention, a rhetoric of sleight-of-hand, an allegorical revision that may adumbrate, that may whisper almost inaudibly its truth to power, throwing its voice as political ventriloquism. Needless to say, this may be increasingly useful as a curatorial tactic, certainly in the US, but of course in so many other places today.

I’m not suggesting this is the only political form of curating. There are other, surely more frontal, curatorial approaches toward resistance, reform, repair, reparation, and community. But the poor space as a cunning form of shifted thought, as a curatorial platform that embodies disembodiment and an altered political situatedness, is a strategic push against the force, the high resolution, of authoritarianism, in order to turn it—like Ryan Gander’s Invisible Pull—into an ungraspable breeze that’s nonetheless felt; to turn the poor space and its particular form of low resolution into a liberatory instrument of fugitive enunciations.

Ryan Gander, I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorize (The Invisible Pull) (2012).

NOTES

1. Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux Journal, number 10 (November 2009), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image.

2. I should note that the poor space that I speak about here is predominantly envisioned as a physical space in which physical exhibitions are staged. But, of course, the poor space can be virtual and accessed through such technological devices as a computer, a mobile phone, or a spatial computing device, such as a VR headset or smart glasses. The poor space accommodates many spatialities and temporalities.

3. See https://www.thecuratorial.net/index/lexicon/curating-swbk8.

4. Steven Henry Madoff, “Metaphor and the Feeling of Fact,” The Brooklyn Rail, October 2013, https://brooklynrail.org/2013/10/criticspage/metaphor-and-the-feeling-of-fact/.

5. Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October 12 (Spring 1980): 69.

6. Ilya Kabakov, as quoted in Mikhail N. Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture, trans. Anesa Miller-Pogacar (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 188.

7. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, volume 4, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 135.

8. See Zdenka Badovinac, Unannounced Voices: Curatorial Practice and Changing Institutions (London: Sternberg Press, 2022), 34.

9. Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 67.

10. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).

11. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

12. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe, UK: Minor Compositions, 2013), 28.

13. See https://www.berlinbiennale.de/en/biennalen/3389/13th-berlin-biennale-for-contemporary-art.

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• About Steven Henry Madoff

  Steven Henry Madoff is the founding chair of the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York and editor in chief of The Curatorial. Previously, he served as senior critic at Yale University’s School of Art. He lectures internationally on such subjects as the history of interdisciplinary art, contemporary art, curatorial practice, and art pedagogy. He has served as executive editor of ARTnews magazine and as president and editorial director of AltaCultura, a project of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His books include Unseparate: Modernism, Interdisciplinary Art, and Network Aesthetics from Stanford University Press; Thoughts on Curating from Sternberg Press (series editor); Turning Points: Responsive Pedagogies in Studio Art Education (contributor) from Teachers College Press; Learning by Curating: Current Trajectories in Critical Curatorial Education (contributor) from Vector; Fabricating Publics (contributor) from Open Humanities Press; What about Activism? (editor) from Sternberg Press; Handbook for Artistic Research Education (contributor) from SHARE; Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) (editor) from MIT Press; Pop Art: A Critical History (editor) from University of California Press; Christopher Wilmarth: Light and Gravity from Princeton University; To Seminar (contributor) from Metropolis M Books; and After the Educational Turn: Critical Art Pedagogies and Decolonialism (contributor) from Black Dog Press. Essays concerning pedagogy and philosophy have appeared in volumes associated with conferences at art academies in Beijing, Paris, Utrecht, and Gothenburg. He has written monographic essays on various artists, such as Marina Abramović, Georg Baselitz, Ann Hamilton, Rebecca Horn, Y. Z. Kami, Shirin Neshat, and Kimsooja, for museums and art institutions around the world. His criticism and journalism have been translated into many languages and appeared regularly in such publications as the New York Times, Time magazine, Artforum, Art in America, Tate Etc., as well as in ARTnews and Modern Painters, where he has also served as a contributing editor. He has curated exhibitions internationally over the last 35 years in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. Most recently, Y.Z. Kami: In a Silent Way at MUSAC, León, Spain, June 2022-January 2023. Madoff is the recipient of numerous awards, including from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Academy of American Poets. He is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).

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An Enfolding: The Exhibitionary Complex and the Self

Steven Henry Madoff • 4/9/25

• Abstract

  Critical Curating is The Curatorial’s section devoted to more theoretically oriented considerations of curatorial research and practice. While of a specialized nature, we seek essays for this section that are written for a broadly engaged intellectual audience interested in curating’s philosophical, historical, aesthetic, political, and social tenets, as well as a labor-based activity and its ramifications.

  This essay reflects on the role and agency of curatorial work through the lens of personal and collective introspection, invoking a memory of the poet William Everson, who used silence and vulnerability to express profound human struggle. It argues that curatorial practice embodies a complex interplay between institutional power, the so-called “exhibitionary complex,” and acts of curatorial care that foster individual growth through what the author calls “elaboration.” Ideas concerning the self are essential to this argument. This turn to individuality as distinct from exhibitionary quantification not only addresses viewers but also curators themselves. Drawing on theorists such as Tony Bennett, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Karl Marx, the text advocates for a curatorial ethics that takes into account these notions of selfhood toward activism in the face of dominant power structures.

I begin with a memory. Around 1980, the American poet first known as Brother Antoninus, and then as William Everson when he left the Dominican brotherhood, came to my school to give a reading. Everson was dying of Parkinson’s. He came to the podium, and then he did something unexpected. He walked out in front of it and stood with his right arm extended, shaking uncontrollably. He didn’t say a word. He just let his ravaged arm quake in the air as he stared at us. It must have been thirty seconds, though it felt terribly longer. Without saying a word, he returned to the podium and read his poems. When he died, I thought of that sign of embattled life held up to his audience as foretaste, resistance, resignation, an aperture opening onto grief. This came to me again the other day amid more news of the devastations of war, and the obvious occurred to me that so few people even have the chance that Everson did so long ago to express their disastrous sense of loss, the briefest sign of mortal contestation.

I come to this now in thinking about curating’s agency, who it addresses, and the ways in which it produces knowledge: knowledge as production, expansion, beneficence, as a collaborative mode of being, as a perceived and enacted form of care since that’s so often spoken of.

To begin this way is meant only to say that what it is to be human, have empathy, produce knowledge, to understand strife and disaster—as well as to experience generosity—redound to the curatorial in its broadest sense and its most practical one of offering frameworks for making, knowing, and feeling into which we pour forms of labor whose mechanisms and protocols are intricate while encompassing all the complications of life.

As with all labor, the work of curators involves infrastructures that support its systemic flows of production and reception, some visible and much of it, like the mechanisms of all machines, not apparent to the eye. The parsing of infrastructure in the case of curatorial work reaches back to Tony Bennett—the late Australian art historian and theorist who coined the term “exhibitionary complex”—and offers a now standard understanding of this work within a larger system that includes the history of museums and their relationship to nationalist power structures. Particularly, he’s speaking of the ways in which cultural institutions metabolize nation-state ideologies and maintain those power structures, with museums mirroring and amplifying ideological positions that further entrench social orders. It isn’t much of a leap, then, to return to where I began in relating mortality to the apparatus of the exhibitionary complex in which curatorial labor resides, as Bennett writes:

The space of representation constituted in the relations between the disciplinary knowledges deployed within the exhibitionary complex thus permitted the construction of a temporally organized order of things and peoples. Moreover, that order was a totalizing one, metonymically encompassing all things and all peoples in their interactions through time. And an order which organized the implied public—the white citizenries of the imperialist powers—into a unity, representationally effacing divisions within the body politic in constructing a “we” conceived as the realization, and therefore just beneficiaries, of the processes of evolution and identified as a unity in opposition to the primitive otherness of conquered peoples.1

Bennett contends that by the nineteenth century, exhibitions became ever-more pliable in serving the “hegemonic strategies of different national bourgeoisies. They made the order of things dynamic, mobilizing it strategically in relation to the more immediate ideological and political exigencies of the particular moment.”2 His thinking rises from Michel Foucault’s writings concerning institutions, power, and governmentality, particularly Discipline and Punish, though it’s all the more (and sadly) apropos of what’s weighing on us now as deaths mount in conflagrations and authoritarian regimes rage and flourish. Bennett’s ideas are foregrounded by Foucault’s notions of biopower, in which he concerns himself with technologies of the self and governmental power over life. Yet in Bennett’s thinking about the exhibitionary, it’s worth considering another avenue in Foucault’s thought, his discussion of the dispositif, or in English, the “apparatus.” Let me quote Foucault from a passage cited in Giorgio Agamben’s essay about him in this regard, “What Is an Apparatus?” Foucault states:

What I'm trying to single out with this term is, first and foremost, a thoroughly heterogeneous set consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the network that can be established between these elements. [...] The apparatus is precisely this: a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge.3

As an apparatus, the exhibitionary complex can be understood as an imperialist model of expansionism, a dispositif deploying corporate mechanisms of manipulation, control, and profit; an apparatus defined earlier by Marx in his Grundrisse, with its full English title being Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, written over the course of the winter of 1857–58. In a passage known as “Fragment on Machines,” Marx writes:

Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labor passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.4

This moving power that moves itself presents a way to think about the exhibitionary complex, or apparatus, when considering the ecology of the art world and how curating moves within it. But this immediately raises a quandary. On the one hand, thinking critically about the exhibitionary complex invokes a critique of power, of imperialism and expansionism, and today we have to add neoliberalist capitalism and its extractivist methods as part of the critique in order to envision ways of subverting and overcoming this moving power that moves itself. The challenge is to acknowledge that our curatorial means for doing this still live within the machine, within the orbit of its centrifugal ambitions, while also recognizing a difference fundamental to what the curatorial is and gives it its significance, its strength as an encompassing activity, its pleasures and its power.

Bennett spoke of the supra-national mission of self-interested imperialist “improvement,” as he put it, in the historical institutionalization of power that shadows the exhibitionary complex. “Improvement” here has the troubling toll of acquisition by any means, and then of manipulation, exclusion and revisionism, suppression and oppression, nuanced or brutal forms of control. Artistic and curatorial knowledge production are of a different stripe both in terms of what improvement and expansion invoke: the more of knowledge and its disciplines—history, sociology, anthropology, economics, linguistics, the hard sciences, knowledge about specific industries and their processes and products, religions and spirituality, theories of race, of pedagogy, studies of climate change, local and global studies of populations, of contemporary technologies such as AI—the breadth is endless, tentacular, deep. And why not?

These are differences that can’t be ignored if we’re to understand most clearly what the ambitions come to mean when we lay out the landscape of the exhibitionary today. Two kinds of expansionism are at play, the regimes of dominant power as they filter into cultural institutions and curatorial practices and the inexhaustible practices of research and knowledge production for audiences toward their individual and collective intellectual and empathic expansion. So: on the one hand, the exhibitionary automaton; on the other, exhibitionary care. On the one hand, curatorial work within the shadow of power; on the other, what we know also exists locally and globally: not cultural institutions that bow to power, but those that speak to it. Curatorial activism can right the long tilt of entrenched prejudicial determinations of what can be collected, displayed, analyzed, and fitted to posterity. This, too, is expansion, but, as I say, of a different kind: exhuming, revivifying, reframing, reconsidering, and puncturing the brackets of power.

These acts are congruent (in a sense not so fanciful) with Everson’s arm shaking in front of us to propose that there is no one way to act in the face of terrible things, in what can be done and remembered as a counterforce of activist being. Which is to say, not merely, in Marx’s words, workers “merely as conscious linkages,” but laborers in the fields of cultural production who aren’t simply linkages within the automaton but willfully autonomous workers moving toward other ends.

A way to think about this is to upend an unspoken assumption when we speak of the exhibitionary complex’s many parts, and that’s to move away from mathematical thinking, from thinking primarily in terms of quantities, of numerousness and aggregation, of a monolithic totality. Instead, it’s crucial to remember who all of these institutions are intended for and are dependent on for their own survival. And that’s to speak of individuals, of viewers as self-moving cognitive workers of reception whose motivation is toward internal growth. This sensory, cognitive “I” has been lost sight of in the quantification of the apparatus and its form of expansionism linked to imperialist/capitalist power.

In writing this, I’m not speaking of each viewer’s formation in the act of entering the special zone of attention we call a museum, a Kunsthalle, a gallery. I’m speaking of elaboration as a process that each “I” may undergo. In the cognitive crucible of being in the world, there is no “we” without a preceding “I,” primary before gathered, self-centric in relation to the whole in the constant avalanche of sluiced reciprocities between self and world—“self,” a construct of presence and reminiscence simultaneously presenting the mind to itself and to the world as representational reflection. And so it is for each self in experiencing an exhibition for which the curatorial task, in its most atomized remit, is essentially and crucially, a form of care that’s addressed not to the roar of the crowd but to the murmur of individual selfhood, personhood. Of course, people do go to exhibitions for sheer amusement, and a capitalist pressure on cultural institutions is to amuse their publics, to enter into a competitive stream of visual moments that captures the thrilled transience of contemporary attention.

But here, if we’re to think of the curatorial task of care as an elaboration of the self that deepens and surprises, encouraging the viewer to leave an exhibition incrementally changed, it’s to elaborate this elaboration and say that it not only magnifies the grain of each viewer’s comprehension but also brings a new transparency to comprehension, a clarity that makes plain. This aspiration is enfolded in the curatorial act that creates an eventfulness for the self, understanding each viewer as a self-moving mover autonomous in introspection and not merely a matter of the automaton’s massification or solely owned by Bennett’s description of a relentless exhibitionary imperialist expansionism.

An irony of our moment is the aporia within the art world that swoons in its dance with capitalism while crowing about freedom and autonomy, celebrating an antique idea of Romantic genius while counting numbers at the museum gate, the biennial gate, the festival gate, the gallery and the auction house. Yet if this elaboration of each self is possible, it’s also possible to argue for introspection and communion as curatorial levers to wedge open and revise institutionalism: not a remaking of the exhibitionary complex if we’re to be realistic, but another vision of what a complex of artistic and curatorial practices could be alongside it.

The Jakarta-based artists’ collective ruangrupa helped us envision this in their collection of collectives for Documenta 15 in 2022. Their invocation of the Indonesian lumbung—the communal rice barn, or gathering house, in which folks join the tumult, negotiation, and collaboration among selves toward a broader kinship. It could be that the very idea of “system” itself, so dear to the exhibitionary complex, might be loosened by the casual convening of an alter-complex in which the felt presence of artistic and curatorial practices articulates a greater valence of personhood over quantifications bracketed by capitalist strictures. Even before the example of ruangrupa, these ideas about cultivating selves individually and in collaboration were approached by Maria Lind when she transformed the Tensta konsthall, from 2011 to 2018, into a center that sought to service the immigrant community on the outskirts of Stockholm, offering them ways to consolidate their fellow-being in an otherwise indifferent Swedish society.

And it occurs to me that this artistic and curatorial inclination toward seeing and recognizing the presentness of individuals has been on my mind for a long time. In December 2010, I published an essay in Artforum titled “Service Aesthetics” in which I differentiated a kind of artistic practice from what Nicolas Bourriaud famously laid out in his 1998 book Relational Aesthetics. I argued that various artists since the 1960s specifically practiced an art not of relations to a generalized audience but of individual address, inviting single people, one at a time, to enter a space with them for a meal, a conversation, even a confrontation.5 And, of course, it’s in 1964 that Susan Sontag writes her essay “Against Interpretation” that concludes with her edict: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”6

I extrapolate that here to say that we need to honor the individual self in pulling it free from the monolith of the exhibitionary apparatus and its regulated systems in order to recognize not only that it’s the individual viewer we always need to acknowledge at the center but that there is, in this sensorial foliation for the viewer and for viewers in communion, a feeling labor in the act of curating that lives alongside the analytical, the research-based, the professionalized practices—the embodiment of a curatorial erotics for the curator, as obvious yet unsaid as this generally is—and in this way, a still more encompassing consideration within the exhibitionary complex of selfhood.

But how to think about this move, this gesture toward selfhood in curatorial care first toward viewers and then toward curators themselves? After all, what I’ve been pointing to is introspection, an inwardness that expands personal meaningfulness, personal being. This brings me back to Foucault by way of another philosopher, Judith Butler. Toward the end of her book Giving an Account of Oneself, she’s trying to untie the knot of Foucault’s thinking about the self and particularly his own self in his final years. In the process, she touches on Foucault’s analysis of the act of confession, and she notes that confession as a public manifestation of the self requires what she calls “a certain performative production of the subject” [...] that “constitutes the aim of confession itself.”

In confessing, Butler writes, “the manifestation of the self dissolves its inwardness and reconstitutes it in its externality.” So, she continues, for Foucault, “In this sense, manifestation does not ‘express’ a self but takes its place, and it accomplishes that substitution through an inversion of the particular self into an outward appearance,” which she also characterizes as a “publicized mode of appearance.”7 Yet that doesn’t mean the self is only identified as an object. It means that the self is a subject for itself and with others. This “mode of reflexivity,” as Butler calls it, is an ethical practice that the self needs in order to conserve itself in the face of external pressures. That’s to say, the self needs to maintain introspection, which is a form of self-sufficiency, precisely in order to avoid becoming that Marxian mereness of workers regulated by external powers.8

Those questions are pressing here as well. As I’m assuming, again, that the self stepping across the threshold of the experiential space of an exhibition is there to contemplate a work of art, a room of artworks, an exhibition of works, ready for the exhibition’s haptic, sensual, cognitive, and ruminative pathways to unfold in the name of elaboration, and that the encounter, query, and care for the self figure into the implicit struggle, the unsaid and the said, between subject and object, in keeping with Foucault’s notion of the apparatus as a “relation of forces.”

So, Foucault asked, “How might and must one appear?” And Butler comments: “If I ask, ‘Who might I be for myself?’ I must also ask, ‘What place is there for an “I” in the discursive regime in which I live?’ and ‘What modes of attending to the self have been established as the ones in which I might engage?’.”9 If we can continue to claim that the self stepping across the threshold of an exhibition is there to contemplate the works for elaboration, that the exhibition’s haptic, sensual, cognitive, and ruminative pathways unfold in the name of elaboration, then Foucault’s notion of the dispositif, of the apparatus, as a “relation of forces,” can be reframed by the curatorial remit of care—particularly as a trajectory for the self in a mode of reflexivity that welcomes the conversion from inward to outward, first individually, then collectively.

Even with the production of the subject that Butler describes, proposing this outwardness of individual being in the confessional mode, there remains the sturdiness and luminous possibility that the self maintains its sufficiency in contrast to the operation of confession that always fixes the self within regulatory social and religious strictures. All of this is to say that the oscillation between individual being and collective being imposes an urgency on curatorial care to dance between the cultivation of individual being, the possibility of collective growth, and an acknowledgment that the strictures of power are real and present. The enunciation of curatorial care toward the conservation of the self and the encouragement of agency must inevitably take those limitations into account. As Butler says, the subject “is always made in part from something else that is not itself—a history, an unconscious, a set of structures, the history of reason—which gives the lie to its self-grounded pretensions.”10

Still, there’s the calling out, the invitation to each self-attending self, the viewer going toward the work in order to enter into introspection, and here the curatorial gesture is a kindred expression of selfhood, just as Butler proposes: “I give an account of myself to you. Furthermore, the scene of address, what we might call the rhetorical condition for responsibility, means that while I am engaging in a reflexive activity, thinking about and reconstructing myself, I am also speaking to you and thus elaborating a relation to an other in language as I go.”11

It’s as if, in the same slow accretion of time and light, each viewer’s sedimented life can both deepen and extrude feelings through what comes to be known in the sensual and cognitive experience of viewing things. We’re all drawn into the narrative of an exhibition, seduced (if it’s any good), offered the pleasures of agreement or challenge, animation, respite, or even the pleasure to reject. (And for the curator, of course, pleasure includes the optical, spatial, and haptic aspects of exhibition-making.) For a moment, this narrative enters each of us, pulls us into the swell of images and objects that become elements in constellations of ideas. Naturally, the edges of pleasure and its depth, its placement within feeling, are unpredictable and personal, as is its duration.

But then what? What is taken in further, metabolized, if this pleasure lasts more than a moment, enters not only the inner world of the self but also the economies of distribution (memory, discussion, reaction, criticality, writing, broadcast), the address to what Franco Bifo Berardi calls “solidary bodies,” bodies accounting for one another. Naturally, this is toward community—an aggregation, a matter of numbers again—but also, I’ll argue, toward the singularity of positioning my “I” in relation to others. That is intrinsic to the viewer’s pleasure and the curator’s responsibility.

This orchestration of selves, of curator and each self brought into its care, is a politics of linkage, transfer, and affiliation in an aspiration for kinship—and it isn’t without a cost. If, in some deeper sense, every curatorial project is also a kind of confession, an exposure and divulging for the public that is its purpose for being, then it’s also a matter of both joy and taxing work, a weight and unburdening that is, at times, trying. The curator’s unknowing toward knowing, that path broken out and broken open, that responsibility, ethics, politics of self toward others, that imagining of a way alongside the automaton, comes with the question Foucault asks: “How much does it cost the subject to tell the truth about itself?”12

But no one asks this of the curator, what the toll of the task is, only the outcome, the surface glint. No one remarks about curatorial labor in the way that Butler observes in response to Foucault’s question: “Our capacity to reflect upon ourselves, to tell the truth about ourselves, is correspondingly limited by what the discourse, the regime, cannot allow into speakability.” So, she remarks, “We must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance.”13

What’s at stake for both the curator and the viewer is the dilation of the self that comes with inventing narratives that disorder the scaffolding of unquestioned truths, finding in the path of unknowing the chances of knowledge, and, in our case, marking the risk and promise of the curatorial chance. In the pastoral sense of responsibility for others and for oneself, curatorial work moves from the internal labor of conceptualization, the path of unknowing, to the outward, confessional divulgence that is the exhibition (or any other form of curatorial project) produced in the name of caring and knowing—whatever that knowing is toward: justice, the subversion of givens, the release of beauty into the world, the realization that there is another way to look, understand, react, determine, be, the sense of the proximity to truth.

Let me be quick to add that issues-based exhibitions aren’t the only ones to be made or are made. The exhibitionary complex lies along a continuum of political geographies, some more punitively restrictive than others. What is allowed into speakability and what is not, driven by ideologies and economics, advance different breadths of curatorial thought and production. How to define entertainment and how to calibrate pleasure are operations that live within the constraints of discourses and regimes. Yet those pleasures of looking, of beauty, visual surprise, mystery, the hint of what is being left in the shadows of the mind to imagine, the delicacy of a thing, the leavened flight of what artistic practice can unleash, all of this remains germane to sustaining the self as the curator lays out the table of our visual and intellectual repass, conceptualizing and presenting what entertains, what stirs, what disturbs. This work, in the account of feeling and knowing, of recognition of self and selves, in the responsibilities of transmission and affiliation with the goal of what Donna Haraway calls “making kin,”14 is the curatorial task sensually, intellectually, politically, imaginatively, and practically—the broadest and most specifically planned and executed task of exhibitionary care, which is both speculum and speculation, mirror and window.

This is a way through or alongside the monolith of the automaton. The will of the curator and the will of each viewer, which is to say the position of the self in and toward the world, are to be acknowledged, to be de-algorithmicized; an erotics of exhibition-making calling to each of us, and each of us answering as we need to, as we can.

NOTES

1. Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 92.
2. Bennett, “Exhibitionary Complex,” 93.
3. Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 2.
4. Karl Marx, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), 620.
5. Steven Henry Madoff, “Service Aesthetics,” Artforum 47, no. 1 (September 2008): 165-169.
6. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 14.
7. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 113-114.
8. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 114.
9. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 114.
10. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 116.
11. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 50.
12. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 120.
13. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 121, 136.
14. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

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• About Steven Henry Madoff

  Steven Henry Madoff is the founding chair of the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York and editor in chief of The Curatorial. Previously, he served as senior critic at Yale University’s School of Art. He lectures internationally on such subjects as the history of interdisciplinary art, contemporary art, curatorial practice, and art pedagogy. He has served as executive editor of ARTnews magazine and as president and editorial director of AltaCultura, a project of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His books include Thoughts on Curating from Sternberg Press (series editor); Turning Points: Responsive Pedagogies in Studio Art Education (contributor) from Teachers College Press; Learning by Curating: Current Trajectories in Critical Curatorial Education (contributor) from Vector; Fabricating Publics (contributor) from Open Humanities Press; What about Activism? (editor) from Sternberg Press; Handbook for Artistic Research Education (contributor) from SHARE; Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century) (editor) from MIT Press; Pop Art: A Critical History (editor) from University of California Press; Christopher Wilmarth: Light and Gravity from Princeton University; To Seminar (contributor) from Metropolis M Books; and After the Educational Turn: Critical Art Pedagogies and Decolonialism (contributor) from Black Dog Press. His new book, Unseparate: Modernism, Interdisciplinary Art, and Network Aesthetics is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Essays concerning pedagogy and philosophy have appeared in volumes associated with conferences at art academies in Beijing, Paris, Utrecht, and Gothenburg. He has written monographic essays on various artists, such as Marina Abramović, Georg Baselitz, Ann Hamilton, Rebecca Horn, Y. Z. Kami, Shirin Neshat, and Kimsooja, for museums and art institutions around the world. His criticism and journalism have been translated into many languages and appeared regularly in such publications as the New York Times, Time magazine, Artforum, Art in America, Tate Etc., as well as in ARTnews and Modern Painters, where he has also served as a contributing editor. He has curated exhibitions internationally over the last 35 years in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. Most recently, Y.Z. Kami: In a Silent Way at MUSAC, León, Spain, June 2022-January 2023. Madoff is the recipient of numerous awards, including from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Academy of American Poets.

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Welcome!

Steven Henry Madoff • 2/1/25

• Abstract

  Welcome to The Curatorial. You will always find in the Abstract a summary of what each section is about, followed by specific details about the essay, transcript, review, video, or portfolio you are about to read, look at, or listen to.

Welcome to The Curatorial.

We’re launching our new international journal, which you can read further about on the About page, with a small number of pieces that will give you the first inkling of what I hope we’ll contribute to your thinking over time: a sense of the cornucopia of ideas around what curating is, roving between the scholarly and practice-based, more whimsical and critically inclined, future-facing and historical.

For example, for the inauguration of The Curatorial, you’ll find two essays more theoretical in nature by members of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN), a global group of practitioners and academics devoted to thinking about curating and curatorial studies. Workshop members also contribute the initial entries in the lexicon we’re developing around crucial terms associated with curatorial practices, with new entries to each term’s definition, along with whole new terms, on a regular basis. They’re joined in the launch by Amira Gad, Conservator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, who writes here about the evolving relationship between digital art in its various forms and cultural institutions. Amira’s piece serves as an introduction to this section of the journal, The Algorithmic State, concerned with the digital realm as it enters more and more fully into artistic and curatorial production. Istanbul- and London-based curator Bige Örer offers a video in the section she has invented for the journal, Walking & Talking, which features her speaking with curators around the world as they traipse through their respective cities and discuss their work. On Site, introduced with a review by Fulbright Scholar Tom Koren, presents critiques of exhibitions, not from the perspective of the art but instead delving into how a show has been curated as a means to share examples and ideas about exhibition-making. And Roulette is what (I hope) it suggests: a roll of the ball on the roulette wheel or a throw of the dice, meaning a more random contribution that may touch on curating in some other way, or perhaps just a cultural topic of interest. The first piece is about curatorial education by the world-renowned Australian art historian and theorist of curating, Terry Smith.

As the ideas build under the various subject banners you see on our entry page, these areas of concentration will deepen. We start with these initial pieces as we invite more writers and slowly augment our offerings—a journal like an herbarium or a grow box under the shine of contemporary insights. Grow with us. Join us.—Steven Henry Madoff, Editor-in-Chief

• About Steven Henry Madoff

  Steven Henry Madoff is the editor-in-chief of The Curatorial and the founding chair of the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).