tro possible

73Positions

To supply a production apparatus with-

out trying, within the limits of the pos-

sible, to change it, is a highly disputable

activity even when the material supplied

appears to be of a revolutionary nature.

—Walter Benjamin, “The Author as

Producer”1

How should we understand the con-

temporary relevance of Walter Ben-

jamin’s “The Author as Producer,” first

delivered to the Institute for the Study

of Fascism in 1934? The lecture, influ-

enced by Bertolt Brecht, was a commit-

ted, polemical intervention arguing

that the “present social situation”—

encompassing the Great Depression,

the rise of Hitler to power, and the fail-

ure of left radicalism to translate into

political action—compelled the writer

to “decide in whose service” he wished

“to place his activity.”2

In 1972—writing against the backdrop

of another international crisis of capi-

tal accumulation, the fraying of social

democracy, and the adoption of the

“Brechtian” Benjamin by the German

Student Movement—Jürgen Habermas

reconsidered the “contemporaneity of

Walter Benjamin,” developing a read-

ing of “The Author as Producer” as af-

firming the instrumental politicization

of art.3 Just as the 1970s have frequent-

ly been compared with the 1930s so it

The Limits

of the Possible

NOTES

1—Walter Benjamin, “The

Author as Producer,” in

Understanding Brecht,

trans. Anna Bostock

(London: Verso, 1998),

85–103.

2—Ibid., 85.

3—Jürgen Habermas,

“Consciousness-Raising

or Redemptive Criticism—

The Contemporaneity of

Walter Benjamin,” New

German Critique 17 (Spring

1979): 30–59. It should be

noted that Habermas reads

the activist sentiment

in the “The Author as

Producer” as pointing to a

problem within Benjamin’s

work since political praxis

is not obviously compatible

with Benjamin’s broader

conception of redemptive

critique.

Luke Skrebowski

John De Andrea, Arden

Anderson and Nora

Murphy, at Documenta V,

1972

Photo Brigitte Hellgoth

© Documenta Archiv

74

4—On this issue see

Gerhard Richter, “The

Work of Art and Its

Formal and Genealogical

Determinations: Benja-

min’s ‘Cool Place’ between

Kant and Nietzsche,” Grey

Room 39 (Spring 2010):

95–113.

seems increasingly plausible that the

2010s—marked by the deepening crisis

of neoliberal capitalism, the reaction-

ary political response to this crisis, and

the search for a plausible response on

the left—will stand comparison with

both eras. Yet such apparent structural

similarities can also mislead. It might

be equally productive to consider how

2010 is not like 1934, nor 1972. We also

need to reflect on Benjamin’s untimeli-

ness.

What are the stakes of enlisting “The

Author as Producer” 76 years after it

was written and appropriating and

transposing its terms in order to re-

frame the activity of the curator as a

producer from the perspective of our

present times? How might Benjamin’s

work make a contribution to the rigor-

ous study of curating?

NOS TEMPS

As a consequence of his anti-historicist

philosophy of time, Benjamin insisted

on the genealogical constitution of

both concepts and works, understand-

ing them to be articulated by and

through their historical transmission

and transformation.4 To deploy Ben-

jamin’s concepts with any measure of

fidelity to his wider (anti-) philosophi-

cal project is then, necessarily, to reac-

tivate them, to demonstrate their con-

temporaneity in light of their history.

Positions Luke Skrebowski

Marcel Broodthaers,

Musée d’Art Moderne,

Département des Aigles,

Section d’Art Moderne at

Documenta V, 1972

Photo Brigitte Hellgoth

© Documenta Archiv /

Pictoright Amsterdam

2010

75Manifesta Journal 10 — 2010

something more about the perspective

of our present times. It is not insignifi-

cant that the opening date of Manifesta

8 was changed so as not to coincide

with the Spanish General Strike. This

situation might suggest a resurgence of

ostensibly antique modes of class con-

sciousness, class solidarity, and class

struggle that have long been sidelined

within (the culture) industry. Or it

might just indicate that the organizers

of Manifesta 8 were concerned about

what would happen if they opened

an international biennial and nobody

turned up because the planes, trains,

and buses weren’t running. Can we say

that Manifesta 8 went on strike? Even

if we can, do we expect anything to

come of it? Benjamin’s contribution to

longstanding debates about the class

position and class affiliation of the au-

thor and the tendency of the work of

art in relation to social change becomes

urgent once again, a memory flashing

up at a moment of danger. Benjamin

suggests that the curator, like the au-

thor, should actively take sides.

Yet before we question the viability

of an “instrumental politicization”

of curating, we need to enquire more

deeply into the social character of

curatorial practice. The proposal to

consider the curator as producer risks

simply eliding author and curator,

looking like it has come down on one

side of a debate which remains contro-

versial and contested, namely whether

the curator can legitimately be consid-

ered an “author” or, in the most radi-

cal formulation of this argument, an

“artist.”6 To enquire precisely how this

debate remains contested is perhaps to

make some inroads into already well-

trodden ground. Benjamin argues that

the (bourgeois) author should cede au-

tonomy as a point of principle, that is

instrumentalize himself in times of ur-

gent political need and under the force

of compulsion: “You believe that the

current social situation forces him [the

writer] to choose in whose service he

Such a methodological procedure is

eminently, and immanently, Benjamin-

ian: “It is not that what is past casts

its light on what is present, or what is

present its light on what is past; rather,

image is that wherein what has been

comes together in a flash with the now

to form a constellation.”5 Here though

it is not only a matter of tracking the

changing force of Benjamin’s “The

Author as Producer” through different

historical conjunctures but also of ac-

counting for the validity or productive

force of the transpositions involved in

arguing for the curator as producer.

By way of coming to the question of the

curator as a producer, we need to say

5—Walter Benjamin,

“Convolute N: On the

Theory of Knowledge;

Theory of Progress,” The

Arcades Project, trans.

Howard Eiland and Kevin

McLaughlin (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University

Press, 2002), 463.

6—For example, compare

Jens Hoffmann’s and Boris

Groy’s opposed positions

on this issue: Jens

Hoffmann, “The Art of

Curating and the Curating

of Art,” Manifesta Journal,

no. 5 (Spring–Summer

2005): 176–85; Boris Groys

“Politics of Installation,”

E-flux Journal, no. 2

(January 2009): http://

www.e-flux.com/journal/

view/31.

76

7—Benjamin, “The Author

as Producer,” 85.

8—Ibid., emphasis added.

9—For a detailed

discussion of autonomy in

the visual arts, addressing

the problems with both

the postmodern critique

of autonomy and the

proto-conservative

returns to the question of

autonomy that avoid the

postmodern expansion

and differentiation of

art’s social base, see

John Roberts, “After

Adorno: Art, Autonomy,

and Critique,” Historical

Materialism, no. 7 (Winter

2000): 221–39.

10—Harald Szeemann,

interview by Hans Ulrich

Obrist, A Brief History

of Curating (Zurich: JRP

Ringier, 2010), 90.

the significance of Documenta V seems

to be corroborated by the hostile re-

sponses that Szeemann received from

his invited artists. Szeemann recalled

Daniel Buren’s objections: “He said

curators were becoming super-artists

who used artworks like so many brush

strokes in a huge painting.”10 The en-

hanced authority of the curator and the

exhibition was perceived to come at the

expense of the artist and the work of

wishes to place his activity.”7 For Ben-

jamin, the “progressive writer . . . plac-

es himself on the side of the proletar-

iat. And that’s the end of his autonomy.

He directs his activity towards what

will be useful to the proletariat in the

class struggle.”8 Without automatically

reaching for the Adornian critique of

the self-defeating, paradoxically heter-

onomous, character of artistic commit-

ment and before broaching the ques-

tion of changes in class composition

since 1934, we need to add a more basic

caveat. Can we say that the curator

has ever been autonomous such that it

makes sense to conceive of the instru-

mental rejection of that autonomy?9

BACK TO 1972

Within the short life of curatorial his-

tory as a field of enquiry, Harald Szee-

mann’s 1972 Documenta V has already

been canonized as a landmark show,

the moment at which the curator is held

to have laid claim to the prerogatives of

the autonomous artist. This reading of


Protests against

Documenta V in front of

Museum Fridericianum,

Kassel, 1972

Photo Brigitte Hellgoth,

Hans-Joachim Baron

© Documenta Archiv


of their control. Artists themselves are

not confined but their output is.”11

Smithson’s thinking here seems to

have been directly inspired by Bre-

cht, also cited by Benjamin in the “The

Author as Producer”: “This confusion

among musicians, writers, and crit-

ics about their situation,’ says Brecht,

‘has enormous consequences which

receive far too little attention. Believing

themselves to be in possession of an ap-

art. Here, Robert Smithson’s critique

of Szeemann (which contributed to

Documenta V in place of a work) was

exemplary: Cultural confinement hap-

pens when a curator imposes his own

limits on an art exhibition, rather than

asking an artist to set his limits. Some

artists imagine they’ve got a hold on

this apparatus, which in fact has got a

hold on them. As a result, they end up

supporting a cultural prison that is out

11—Robert Smithson,

“Cultural Confinement”

(1972), in The Collected

Writings, ed. Jack Flam

(Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California

Press, 1996), 154.


paratus which in reality possesses them,

they defend an apparatus over which

they no longer have control . . . ”12

For Smithson, the curator was un-

equivocally coextensive with the ap-

paratus. Yet Smithson’s Brechtian

critique was leveled at Szeemann at

precisely the moment that curatorial

practice could plausibly lay a claim to

a relative autonomization from its tra-

ditional overdetermination by the bu-

reaucratic imperatives and constraints

of the state- or corporate-sponsored

museum. A small international market

began to emerge for a new type of cura-

tor in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as

Paul O’Neill has observed in his discus-

sion of the path-breaking work of Har-

ald Szeemann, Seth Siegelaub, Pontus

Hultén, and Kasper König. O’Neill notes

that these curators initiated a gradual

change in the role of the curator, from

“carer and behind-the-scenes aesthetic

arbiter” to “a more centralized position

on a much broader stage, with a crea-

tive, political and active part to play in

the production, mediation and dissemi-

nation of art itself.”13

The new category of the curator as

exhibition-maker involved not sim-

ply mediation but also production.

Curators began to originate exhibi-

tions whose conceptual framework

determined the works within them

rather than the other way around, as

had traditionally been the case. At the

extreme end of this tendency curators

would fly artists in to their exhibitions

in order to create works to order (sav-

ing on shipping, insurance, and art

handling costs in the process). However

under such circumstances many artists

started to feel like they were becom-

ing subcontractors to the curator and

Images page 78-79:

Hans Haacke, Documenta

-Besucherprofil, 1972

©Hans Haacke / Pictoright

2010

12—Benjamin, “The Author

as Producer,” 98; emphasis

added. Smithson’s library

included a copy of Brecht

on Theatre, an English

language edition of

Brecht’s writings on drama.

See Eugenie Tsai and

Corneli Butler (eds.), Robert

Smithson (Los Angeles: The

Museum of Contemporary

Art, 2004), 247.

13—Paul O’Neill, interview

by Annie Fletcher, in Paul

O’Neill (ed.), Curating

Subjects (Amsterdam: De

Appel/Open Editions,

2007), 12.

80 Positions Luke Skrebowski

began to mobilize for the maintenance

of their position within the challenged

status quo (the Art Workers Coalition

took the form of a trade union bargain-

ing for better working conditions; Seth

Siegelaub’s proposed “Artist’s Reserved

Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement”

was a clear attempt to extend tradi-

tional property relations in the artist’s

favor).14

Paradoxically, even as conceptual art-

ists were challenging every aspect of

the definition of the work of art they

were also actively defending a tradi-

tional division of creative labor. The

infamous anti-curatorial polemic that

they instigated, as placed in the form

of an advertisement in the June 1972 is-

sue of Artforum, neatly embodies this

contradiction. Reversing the logic of

the magazine work of conceptual art-

ists (the radical artistic appropriation of

a commercial form), a radical political

form was commercialized.

A related tension between challenging

14—On the Art Worker

Coalition see Julia Bryan-

Wilson, Art Workers:

Radical Practice in

the Vietnam War Era

(Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California

Press, 2009). Discussing

the “Artist’s Reserved

Rights Transfer and Sale

Agreement,” Siegelaub has

unequivocally stated, “The

contract did not question

the limits of capitalism

and private property; it

just shifted the balance

of power in favour of the

artist over some aspects

of the work of art once

it was sold.” Obrist, A

Brief History of Curating,

125–126.


and defending the status quo can be

observed in Hans Haacke’s Documenta

Visitor’s Profile (1972), made for Szee-

mann’s Documenta despite Haacke’s

objections to his curatorial method.

By deploying a version of a Brechtian

Verfremdungseffekt (estrangement ef-

fect) within the mise-en-scène of Docu-

menta V, Haacke sought to make visitors

aware of the apparatus of the show. Yet

Haacke’s piece arguably stopped short

of a full Brechtian Umfunktionierung

(functional transformation) as en-

dorsed by Benjamin in “The Author as

Producer.” Haacke’s work revealed but

did not functionally transform the ap-

paratus it surveyed. Documenta Visitors

Profile was politically ambiguous and

this ambiguity was reflected in Haacke’s

broader position on art’s equivocal so-

cial function: “Teachers, journalists,

priests, art professionals and all other

producers and disseminators of mental

products, are engaged in the cementing

of the dominant ideological constructs

as well as in dismantling them. In many

Hans Haacke, Documenta

-Besucherprofil, 1972

©Hans Haacke / Pictoright

2010

82

structural position within the art world

than that given by Smithson and Buren.

After leaving the Kunsthalle Bern in

1969, Szeemann founded the Agentur

für Geistige Gastarbeit (Agency for in-

tellectual migrant work). Szeemann’s

self-description as an “intellectual

guest-worker” should not be misunder-

stood as an exercise in self-deprecating

humor, but rather as a precise designa-

tion. Independent curators were some

of the first to confront the new insti-

tutional forms and working arrange-

ments inaugurated by the post-Fordist

reorganization of labor that began in

the early 1970s. They were in the avant-

ways this group reflects the ambiguous

role of the petite-bourgeoisie . . .”15

By radically reorganizing the exhibi-

tion format and its means and relations

of production it was the curator, rather

than the institutionally critical artist,

who was responsible for the greatest

functional transformation of the ar-

tistic apparatus during the 1970s. In

what direction did this transformation

tend though? Not primarily, I suggest,

toward the usurpation of artistic au-

tonomy by the curator. If we consult

Szeemann’s self-characterization, we

find a very different account of his


15—Hans Haacke, “The

Constituency” (1977), in

Walter Grasskamp, Molly

Nesbit, and Jon Bird (eds.),

Hans Haacke (London:

Phaidon Press, 2004), 111.

16—In the lexicon of

Antonio Negri’s Goodbye

Mr Socialism, ed. Raf

Valvola Sclesi, trans.

Peter Thomas (London:

Serpent’s Tail, 2008), the

precariat is described

as follows: “The concept

originated in Italy in the

1970s in order to define the

non-guaranteed forms of

labour in the education

system; subsequently, it

was extended in order to

define in toto the multiple

juridical forms utilized in

post-Fordist production:

labour agencies, flexible

work, contract work,

internships, atypical

work, freelance workers,

temping, and so on.” (245)

17—Benjamin, “The

Author as Producer,” 87.

Underlined sections add

Artforum, June 1972


18—It is an issue that

remains relatively under-

theorized. For a partial

exception see Simon Sheikh,

“Constitutive Effects: The

Techniques of the Curator,”

in O’Neill, Curating

Subjects, 174–85. Sheikh has

many suggestive things to

say about the possibilities

of new exhibition formats

and their ability to

mobilize counter-publics

but does not reflect on the

constraints that impinge

on curatorial technique

as a consequence of its

relationship to the means

of production. This is, it

should be acknowledged,

a consequence of the

article’s focus on Cornelius

Castoriadis’s account of

the role of the imaginary

in social and institutional

change.

19—Alexei Penzin and Paolo

Virno, “The Soviets of the

Multitude: On Collectivity

and Collective Curating,”

Manifesta Journal, no. 8

(2009-2010), 57.

tion. Curatorial technique, by analogy

with Benjamin’s literary technique,

does not simply define the skills re-

quired to produce an exhibition (choos-

ing or inventing a format, determining

a pertinent theme, selecting apposite

artists, assembling a show, etc.). It is al-

so internal to general Technik: society’s

means and relations of production. The

possibilities of the first sense (tech-

nique as a particular way of making

an exhibition) are constrained by the

second sense (technique as the struc-

tures within which exhibitions must

be made). Relations of production are

impacted by means of production (this

is the reason for Benjamin’s distinction

between the possibilities available to

the author in the Soviet press as com-

pared to the bourgeois press). It is this

second sense of curatorial technique

that requires more theoretical attention

today.18

If the contemporary curator is a mem-

ber of the precariat, then it might be

most productive to begin to speculate

about what modes of resistance are

available to curatorial technique. We

might expect these to go beyond the

(art) strike, a form that risks returning

to the politics of the 1930s without pay-

ing sufficient attention to the lessons

of the 1970s. Perhaps then we need to

make a small but significant amend-

ment to the peroration of “The Author

as Producer: ” “For the revolutionary

struggle is not fought between capital-

ism and mind. It is fought between capi-

talism and the proletariat precariat.”

Might this inspire a dissenting twenty-

first-century curatorial practice to

rediscover the constructivist moment

within Benjamin’s thought, deploying

curatorial technique in the interests

of a new vanguard project taking up

Paolo Virno’s challenge of “articulat-

ing a public sphere that is no longer

connected to the State,” and building

“institutions of the multitude?”19 Time,

measured in biennia, will tell.

garde of the precariat.16 Contrary to the

image of the contemporary, “independ-

ent” curator, what if curatorial practice

has always been heteronomous?

ON CURATORIAL TECHNIQUE

Any attempt to reactivate Benjamin in

the present and appropriate his work

for an account of the curator as pro-

ducer needs to go via the 1970s, recog-

nizing that the emergence of the pre-

cariat constitutes a decisive historical

inflection point that must be fed back

into Benjamin’s dialectic. Here we need

to be alert to distinctions between Ben-

jamin’s historical conjuncture and our

own and how these differences might

affect the deployment of Benjaminian

concepts.

What is at stake in the appropriation

of “The Author as Producer” for cura-

torial theory is therefore the decisive

transformation of a concept under

new historical circumstances. In this

context a substitution has been made

such that curator stands in the place of

author and, presumably concomitantly,

exhibition in the place of the work

of art. We can thus reformulate Ben-

jamin’s frequently cited reconstitution

of the problem of correct political “ten-

dency” as follows:

Before I ask: what is a work’s an

exhibition’s position vis-à-vis the

production relations of its time, I

should like to ask: what is its posi-

tion within them? This question

concerns the function of a work

an exhibition within the literary

artistic production relations of its

time. In other words, it is directly

concerned with literary curatorial

technique.17

Consequently it is the question of cu-

ratorial technique (rather than whether

the curator can be considered an au-

thor) that presents itself most urgently

today. This term needs some clarifica-

tro possible

Documents

brechtian benjamin

possiblenotes1walter

benjamins work

political praxis

work of art

benjamins concepts

plausible response

benjamins untimeliness