Review
“Looking back on an exhibition that took place thirty-four years ago and recalling it in memory cannot be done without a little irritation; just as little as looking back on a text that I myself wrote about this very exhibition seventeen years ago and which undoubtedly represents the decisive filter of my memory. What did I actually see back then, in 1990, what was shaped, elevated or even distorted by this filter of memory from 2007, and what would I want to see in it today, again under drastically changed conditions? Is there an unobstructed view at all or are there only layers of fundamentally deceptive memories and interpretations? Both the truly authentic access across these years and the total relativity represented in time itself seem to me to be unsatisfactory insofar as they cannot do justice to the demands of the matter itself. For the question of retrospection, which is the actual theme here in the very act of writing these lines, was already present in a peculiar way in the original exhibition. There, in the thematically invoked myth of Orpheus in Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film version, the focus was clearly on crossing the border between life and death and communicating with the “other side.” Implicitly however, the theme of looking back, which in Orpheus’s case is fatal, had also been present; because in the act of looking back, he loses the very thing for which he had dared to cross the border to death in the first place: Eurydice.1
In his exhibition from 1990 the artist, Fareed Armaly, had interpreted this theme in terms of a myth underlying the institution of exhibiting itself. This institutional myth says: dare to go beyond your limits and don’t look back! Better forget reassuring yourself of your origins, your conditions and whatever deficient prerequisites you may have: instead, forge ahead undaunted in the direction of what the institution presents to you as its “civilizing mission.” The exhibition takes up this myth by using decisive sequences from Cocteau’s film to lead the viewer through the building to the exhibition space on the sixth floor, the core of the institutional accumulation of value, only to turn back there in front of a locked glass door and to confront the viewer with precisely these conditions and prerequisites of exhibiting itself. In the myth, looking back has become the shadow of looking forward, so to speak. Human desire and curiosity motivate every movement to transcend the boundaries of the knowable and to merge into the totality of a cosmic order beyond time and finitude. At the same time, they represent the decisive obstacles that prevent a lasting transgression of such a boundary and ultimately cause the gesture of transgression to fall back to its starting point.”
…
“From today’s perspective, what I find particularly interesting about the Orphée 1990 exhibition is its thematization of the permeability of borders, both on an institutional, social and economic level and in relation to the artistic intervention itself. In the immediate context of the events of 1989, when the postwar order with its strict political divisions collapsed, the question of the significance of borders on a personal, cultural, communicative, and finally economic and geopolitical level became increasingly virulent. A neoliberal understanding of globalization began to emerge, for which the liquefaction of all borders seemed to be only a matter of time. In contrast to these liberal readings, Orphée 1990 insisted on the metaphorical dimension and thus on the fact that borders do not simply dissolve, but become the actual field of conflict between literalness and meaning, between limitation and the opening up of possibilities. Accordingly, Armaly’s artistic methodology consistently aims neither at the identitarian closure of individual social or cultural areas nor at their categorical dissolution: it repeatedly draws on his own diasporic identity as a Palestinian-American as well as his cultural imprint as part of a “recording culture generation,” as he himself calls it, for whom the archival availability of pop-cultural manifestations between television, film, video and music had become a matter of course. In other words, it is constitutively about the exchange between different offers of identity, about the scope between the individual cultural sectors or national characteristics, between art and culture and ultimately between history and the present. The respective boundaries between the areas become visible here as interfaces of representation, and the artistic commitment consists decisively in working through these interfaces in their medial, discursive and institutional dimensions in order to bring their social, economic and political codings to light.2
Today, however, the permeability of borders is no longer a dominant theme: on the contrary, borders seem to have increasingly hardened again, both in the personal, identity-political sense and in the global frame of reference of a now multipolar world order. For example, the demand for a total liquefaction of all borders of a sexual, national, class-related or cultural nature can itself take the very form of identity politics.”
…
“Against this backdrop, Orphée 1990 can be read as a multi-layered work that is deeply rooted in its time and still represents a challenge for any contemporary perspective. From the abundance of historical, political, economic and cultural references that the work invokes, the particular artistic methodology emerges in retrospect, embedding these references in an exhibition setting that becomes the actual artistic and media deployment. In it, time is frozen in its categorically unavailable past and at the same time condensed like a model, and thus remains available for any further poetic referentiality. This means that even if the social, economic, media and political conditions have changed drastically in the meantime, the challenge remains as to how these conditions can still be addressed and—both reflexively and productively—brought to the fore as art. This artistic work on the boundaries of identity, institution and discourse demonstrates its enduring topicality precisely because of the changed conditions.”
(Excerpt)