August 16, 2006
A roundtable led by Chris Gilbert, and his resignation from the Berkeley Art Museum
While doing research for a current project, I came across the published transcript of a discussion between Chris Gilbert, TJ Demos, Carlos Basualdo, and Gregory Sholette held in late 2004 at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where Gilbert then worked as a curator. After a brief introduction, Gilbert laid out three questions for discussion:
One concerns how fully informal creation and underground practices—their look and their techniques—can be commodified by the market and incorporated into the gallery system. Greg has suggested that dark matter is only superficially appropriable—that the art industry merely trades in simulations of collective informal work and adopts only the look or manner of dark matter. It could be argued, however, that appropriation of an underground is always superficial and that there is something circular about saying that the politics of the work is not appropriable or commodifiable—since, of course, the politics of underground work could be defined as simply that-which-is-not-commodifiable.A second question concerns the internal structure of dark matter. How are informal production and its creators organized? For example, how are zine-makers connected with each other? A tentative answer, and a seeming given, is that there are many-to-many connections among the producers, who relate to one another through rhizomatic structures rather than arborescent, hierarchical ones. For example, in the way zine creators communicate with each other, a weblike or horizontal structure is immediately suggested. Another seeming given is that there is an inherent collectivity to dark matter's organization; working together, working socially, appears to be integral to labor in its immaterial form.
A third and final question concerns the agency of this exhibition and of art exhibitions more generally. If exhibitions organize work—and exhibition curators are often described as "organizers"—to what degree does their organizational work play into the hands of capital and increase the governability of the work and the producers? This raises the further question of how one can exhibit artworks as singularities (in their singularity) and resist the unifying logic of an exhibition. For some years I've been concerned with the problem of "curatorial panopticism," by which I mean not so much the literal figure of the panopticon as it might be realized in this or that exhibition, but the idea that a panoptic logic underpins the structure of most exhibitions.
If these questions are of interest to you, the rest of the lengthy discussion will reward the time you spend with it. These are topics that I am also considering, albeit from the standpoint of someone who primarily writes about art rather than organizes exhibitions.
As perhaps many of you know, Gilbert caused waves in the art world a few months ago by abruptly resigning from his job at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, where he was responsible for the "MATRIX" series of exhibitions. The source of the hubbub, specifically, was his resignation letter, which has been posted publicly on the internet (click here for a printer-friendly version). At the end of the letter, Gilbert expands upon the specific reason for his resignation (a dispute over the language of a wall text accompanying this exhibition) and delivers this pointed critique:
I think it is important to be clear about the facts that precipitated my resignation: that is, the struggle over the wording of the text panel, which fit into months of struggle over the question of solidarity and alignment with a revolutionary political agenda. That issue is discussed above. However, it is also important to understand the context. Again, it is too weak to say that museums, like universities, are deeply corrupt. They are. (And in my view the key points to discuss regarding this corruption are (1) the museum's claim to represent the public's interests when in fact serving upper-class interests and parading a carefully constructed surrogate image of the public; (2) the presence of intra-institutional press and marketing departments that really operate to hold a political line through various control techniques, only one of which is censorship; finally (3) the presence of development departments that, in mostly hidden ways, favor and flatter rich funders, giving the lie to even the sham notion of public responsibility that the museum parades). However, to describe museums and other cultural institutions as simply if deeply corrupt is, as I said, too weak in that it both holds out the promise of their reform and it ignores the larger imperialist structures that make their corruption an inevitable upshot and reflection of the exploitive political and social system of which they form a part. Such institutions will go on reflecting imperialist capitalist values, will celebrate private property and deny social solidarity, and will maintain a strict silence about the control of populations at home and the destruction of populations abroad in the name of profit, until that imperialist system is dismantled. Importantly, it will not be dismantled by cultural efforts alone: a successful reform of a cultural institution here or there would at best result in "islands" of sanity that would most likely operate in a negative way—as imaginary and misleading "proof" that conditions are not as bad as they are.In fact, with conditions as they are, a different strategy is required: there should be disobedience at all levels; disruptions and explosions of the kind that I, together with a small group of allies inside the museum, have created are also useful on a symbolic level. However, the primary struggle and the only struggle that will result in a significant change would be one that works directly to transform the economic and political base. This would be a struggle aiming to bring down the US government and its imperialist system through highly organized efforts.
Through an earlier job I came to know Gilbert somewhat, and have corresponded with him (and his wife) in the past. It is premature for me to comment now, but I will simply say that from what I know of him, the decision to quit, especially in such a spectacular manner, was only arrived at after significant thought; he was never one to take anything lightly. (The discussion linked above is certainly evidence of this.) Instead, here is the Berkeley Daily Planet's story on his resignation, as well as a lengthy discussion at Mute magazine. Gilbert seems to have deliberately sunk below the art-world radar, as yet offering no further commentary on his resignation. I, for one, am very curious to see where, how, and if he turns up again.