The Labyrinth as an Exhibitionary Model: Form, Event, and Mode of Life

Abstract

As we set out to construct the history of exhibitions from our contemporary vantage point, one of the central questions to consider is the relationship between models that emerged in the postwar European context—between the years 1945 and 1972—and current artistic and curatorial practices. The genealogies that we establish are not only significant because of their institutionalizing power, authorizing the preeminence of specific artists, curators, and exhibitions while potentially obscuring others; they also allow us to reflect on the connections and ruptures between the postwar period and our contemporaneity. As an art historian, a crucial aspect of my own project of writing about modern and contemporary art is to explore both the critical “potentialities” and historical “blind spots” of aesthetic paradigms and propositions. To understand how traditional disciplinary narratives have been formed and, for the most part, continue to maintain the hegemonic role of Western modernism and its biopolitics, we need to reflect on the questions that are asked, methodologies employed, and theories applied to the art objects and aesthetic events that are the focus of our study. Towards this goal, one of this article’s central interests is to delineate the ruptures and continuities in the understanding of the labyrinth, analyze its function in organizing exhibitionary practices, and consider its role in engendering specific types of social bonds within two distinct economic phases: liberalism and neoliberal global capitalism.