THE EXPERTIMENTAL TURN

PERFORMATIVITY

In the past ten to fifteen years the word performative has advanced
from a theoretical term used by a few linguistic philosophers to a key
rubric within the discourse of contemporary art and aesthetics. Today
any artwork that in some formal, thematic, or structural way alludes to
ideas of embodiment, enactment, staging, or theater is called
performative. Any visual artwork that relates to a here-and-now, and
thus in some way or another refers to the idea of performance without
being a performance, is called a performative artwork. Yet this
misunderstanding of performative as meaning “performance-like” has
led to considerable confusion, mainly because it is impossible to
clearly define what a performative artwork actually is. As a category it
remains stubbornly slippery—and with good reason, because the use
of the term is based on a complete twist of the word’s original
meaning.
There is no performative artwork because there is no
nonperformative artwork. The notion of the performative was
introduced into linguistic theory by the British philosopher John
Langshaw Austin in his lecture series “How to Do Things with
Words,” given at Harvard University in 1955. Austin coined the
term performative in order to point to the actlike character of
language. He argued that in certain cases something that was said
produced an effect beyond the realm of language. In other words,
under certain conditions signs can produce reality; one can do things
with words. The classic examples of what Austin at first thought
would constitute a particular category of utterances—the
“performatives”—originate in legal discourse: “I now pronounce you
man and wife” and “I hereby sentence you to six years imprisonment
without parole.” Although Austin had originally planned to isolate
certain utterances under the notion of the performative, he soon
understood that a clear-cut distinction between a constative (reality-
describing) and a performative (reality-producing) way of speaking
could not be made. If every utterance contains both constative and
performative aspects, it is tautological to speak about “performative
language.” And the same principle applies to artworks. It makes little
sense to speak of a performative artwork because every artwork has a
reality-producing dimension.
To speak about the performative in relation to art is not about
defining a new class of artworks. Rather, it involves outlining a
specific level of the production of meaning that basically exists in
every artwork, although it is not always consciously shaped or dealt
with, namely, its reality-producing dimension. In this sense, a specific
methodological orientation goes along with the performative, creating
a different perspective on what produces meaning in an artwork. What
the notion of the performative brings into perspective is the contingent
and elusive realm of impact and effect that art brings about both
situationally—that is, in a given spatial and discursive context—and
relationally, that is, in relation to a viewer or a public. It recognizes
the productive, reality-producing dimension of artworks and brings
them into the discourse. Consequently we can ask: What kind of
situation does an artwork produce? How does it situate its viewers?
What kind of values, conventions, ideologies, and meanings are
inscribed into this situation?
What the notion of the performative in relation to art actually
points to is a shift from what an artwork depicts and represents to the
effects and experiences that it produces—or, to follow Austin, from
what it “says” to what it “does.” In principle, the performative triggers
a methodological shift in how we look at anyartwork and in the way in
which it produces meaning. Understood in this way, it indeed offers a
very interesting and challenging change of perspective. Used as a
label to categorize a certain group of contemporary artworks,
however, it makes little sense.

Every artwork produces some kind of

(aesthetic) experience. But as I would like
to argue, from the 1960s onward, the
creation and shaping of experiences have
increasingly become an integral part of
the artwork’s conception.
Yet the fact that the performative is not a label does not mean that
we cannot use it to shed light on those art phenomena to which it is
most often applied. A concern with an artwork’s effects on the viewer
and with the situation in which it takes place has indeed become a
dominant feature of contemporary art since the 1960s. Although I am
aware that a new notion will cause new problems, I want to suggest
the experiential turn as a term that might be more appropriate and
useful to describe these ongoing tendencies in contemporary art. The
competing hypothesis, then, would be that for a few decades visual art
has increasingly turned toward the production of experiences. What
does this mean? Every artwork produces some kind of (aesthetic)
experience. But as I would like to argue, from the 1960s onward, the
creation and shaping of experiences have increasingly become an
integral part of the artwork’s conception. A 1960 Minimal installation
by Robert Morris hardly produces meaning—if one understands
meaning in the traditional sense as something that is located within the
object and needs to be “read” or “discerned” by a viewer. It certainly
produces an experience, though, in the way that it relates to the space
and to the viewer’s body. Referring to works such as Bruce Nauman’s
corridors and reflecting on their tactile-kinesthetic involvement of the
viewer, art historian Oskar Bätschman introduced the term
“experience shaper,” a notion that could easily be applied to a variety
of contemporary artworks. Daniel Buren, for example, speaks of his
works as “exemplary experiences,” and in the 1990s an entire
generation approached the experiential dimension of art, in works
such as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s experiential spaces and
Rirkrit Tiravanija’s staged intersubjective experiences. What
happened? How could “experiences” become something like an
artistic medium in contemporary art? How are experiences created,
shaped, and reflected in artworks, and how do they produce meaning?
In the discussion that follows, I would like to approach this focus
on art’s experiential dimension from two sides. First, I look at the
issue from an art historical perspective, outlining its birth in certain
artistic positions within Minimal Art and drawing a line from them to
more recent and present tendencies. Second, I argue that art’s
“experiential turn”—and the new focus on the perceiving,
experiencing subject that comes with it—resonates with the
fundamental economic and cultural transformations of Western
bourgeois-industrial societies in the late twentieth and early twenty-
first centuries. Referencing sociological theories such as those put
forth by Gerhard Schulze in The Experience Society, I propose that the
artistic shift toward the creation of experiences should be seen in the
context of a general revaluation of experiences as a central focus of
cultural, social, and economic activity.
Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2006 (pavilion, table, and puzzle representing the famous painting by Delacroix
“La Liberté Guidant le Peuple,” 1830), 2006, wood, metal, jigsaw puzzle, 118 ⅛ x 157 ½ x 267 ¾ in. (300 x 400.1
x 680.1 cm) overall installed. Collection Walker Art Center, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2006, 2006.88.1-.38.
Installation view, Walker Art Center, 2010.
Bruce Nauman, Performance Corridor, 1969, wallboard and wood, 96 × 240 × 20 in. (243.8 × 609.6 × 50.8 cm).
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Panza Collection, Gift 92.4162. ©2014 Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York. Installation view, Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, Whitney Museum of American
Art, New York, 1969.
Robert Irwin, untitled, 1971, synthetic fabric, wood, fluorescent lights, floodlights, 96 x 564 in. (243.8 x 1432.6 cm).
Collection Walker Art Center, Gift of the artist, 1971, 1971.17. ©Robert Irwin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York.

PERCEPTION, EXPERIENCE, SITUATION

Certain positions within Minimal Art during the 1960s
fundamentally changed the relationship between the object and its
viewer, between art and its venue, by completely shifting the meaning
of the object to the experience had with and through it. They
suggested a situational focus in the visual arts through the way in
which they introduced a consciousness of the space and the bodily
situatedness of the viewer.
The key artistic figure in this context is Robert Morris, whose
artworks and writings most explicitly question the traditional notion of
both art object and viewer in favor of what Rosalind Krauss has called
a “lived bodily perspective.” In 1971 Morris said, “I want to provide a
situation where people can become more aware of themselves and
their own experience rather than more aware of some version of my
experience,” indicating the crucial shift of focus from the artist and his
or her intention to the viewer’s aesthetic and nonaesthetic experience.
Traditionally, any artwork is seen as a representation of the artist’s
intentions. It incorporates an act of creation that constitutes its ground
and essence. With Minimal Art, the focus shifts from this interior
ground to an outward effect. The artwork is no longer seen as
representing a mental, internal space or consciousness. Instead it
forms part of an external space—which it shares with its viewer—in
which meaning is produced in relation to a given situational reality.
Internal relations of form and content retreat behind the object’s
impact on this situation, an impact that throws viewers back on
themselves, in a space and a situation.

The works of Carl Andre and Robert Irwin are, in very different
ways, based on these premises. Known for his floor objects—bricks
and plates that lie on the ground, arranged in basic modular forms—
Andre introduced a new awareness of the artwork’s physical reality as
an aesthetic phenomenon shared with the viewer’s reality. Both
artwork and viewer occupy the same nonmetaphorical and
nonsymbolic space. Today one might wonder why Andre’s works
(particularly the planes on which people can walk) elicited such strong
reactions when they were first shown. But apart from the provocative
fact that there was almost nothing “worked” in these serially arranged
ready-made units, it was the sheer fact of their horizontality that
prompted the negative public response. Andre was interested in
horizontality because it extended into, and hence revealed, its
surroundings—and also because it struck at the traditional concept of
sculpture as a vertical and anthropomorphic form. Horizontality, as
Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss have argued, is the plane
of bassesse and thus something decidedly unmonumental. “Don’t
touch” is normally the prior rule of any art encounter. Here were
artworks that you could walk on.
 Robert Irwin began his career in the 1950s as a painter before he
turned to making objects such as discs and acrylic columns. The
presentation and placement of these works then became more and
more crucial, and Irwin eventually sought to dissolve the distinction
between the edge of the sculpture and its environment. He gave up
studio art and started creating works that responded to specific
situations. Considered part of the Light and Space movement—a
branch of Minimalism originating in Southern California in the
1960s—Irwin produced site-specific works that addressed the scale
and structural parameters of the space, setting and challenging the
limits of perception. The investigation of perception and
phenomenological experience—even the exploration of art as an
inquiry into the nature of thought and experience—became the core of
his interventions. Irwin’s shift from the discrete object to the staging
of experiences determined by the conditions of their site led him to
work in very different contexts. He started integrating experiential
relationships into the architectural environment, but he also designed
gardens and took on landscape projects. In 1992 he began planning the
Central Garden for the new Getty Center in Los Angeles. And when
New York’s Dia Art Foundation opened its new museum,
Dia:Beacon, director Michael Govan asked Irwin to “design” the
museum’s experience.
Carl Andre, Slope 2004, 1968, steel, ½ x 204 x 38 in. (1.3 x 518.2 x 96.5 cm). Collection Walker Art Center, Art
Center Acquisition Fund, 1969, 1969.12. Art ©Carl Andre/VAGA, New York, NY.

Dan Graham, Two-way Mirror Punched Steel Hedge Labyrinth, 1994–1996, stainless steel, glass, arborvitae, 90 x
206 x 508 in. (228.6 x 523.2 x 1290.3 cm). Collection Walker Art Center, Gift of Judy and Kenneth Dayton, 1966,
1996.133. ©Dan Graham.
Although for artists like Andre, Irwin, and
Graham the visual remains an important
factor in art, their works dismiss a
reflexive spectator-object relationship in
favor of a felt and lived experience.

Carsten Höller, Test Site, 2006. ©Carsten Höller/©Tate Photography. Installation view in Turbine Hall, Tate
Modern, London.

Dan Graham’s pavilions are another example of a Postminimalist

extension of experience-oriented art. Often placed within public
landscapes or parks, Graham’s structures play with the effects of
reflective and transparent glass, allowing different forms of perception
and experience of oneself and others. The properties of the mirrored
glass cause one side of a pavilion to be either more reflective or more
transparent than the other, depending on which receives more light.
Two-way mirrors used in office buildings are always totally reflective
on the exterior and totally transparent for the workers within, so that a
kind of surveillance power is given to the corporate side. Referencing
this psychosocial dimension of their material, Graham’s pavilions
offer interior and exterior views that are both quasi-reflective and
quasi-transparent. Graham himself sees these works as
“psychological, philosophical model[s],” stating, “Metaphorically,
each pavilion may be seen as an ‘ego’ which gets its identity in a
continuous semi-reflection of another semi-reflective ‘ego.’”
Although for artists like Andre, Irwin, and Graham the visual
remains an important factor in art, their works dismiss a reflexive
spectator-object relationship, in which meaning is determined only by
the optical exchange across the visual field, in favor of a felt and lived
experience of corporeality, a haptic or tactile phenomenology of the
body as it encounters the physical world. These changes, which were
induced by Minimalist aesthetics and its phenomenological model of
experience, which conceptual art later replaced with a semiotic model
of experience, led to a paradigmatic reconception of both the notion of
the object and the idea of the viewing subject that became essential to
a generation of artists working in the 1990s. In his “Notes on
Sculpture,” Robert Morris writes that the object does not become less
important but “has merely become less self-important.” In
installations by artists such as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Philippe
Parreno, and Carsten Höller, the autonomous object retreats behind
the idea of restoring the experiential, social, and intersubjective
capacities of art. When Höller installs giant slides in the Tate
Modern’s Turbine Hall, the object—although clearly one with a
sculptural quality—functions like a tool for producing an experience
of oneself (or of a different side of oneself).The actual aesthetic effect
of the work lies in its capacity to trigger this experimental self-
relation. Viewing the slides, we communicate not with the sensitivity
or the specific subjectivity of the artist—as we might do when
contemplating other artworks, for example, drawings—but with
ourselves and others who enter into the same experience.
The subject, however, is no longer the “recipient” of the museum
in its canonical nineteenth-century formation. Contrary to the way in
which nineteenth-century viewers received a canon through quietly
reflecting on the works—thereby submitting to the authority of
history, the state, knowledge, and so on—artists such as Höller
propose a notion of reflection that is inseparably bound to a lived, felt,
and situated dimension of experience. They address a subject for
whom looking is as much the body as the eyes, a subject whose body
engages in an active encounter with the physical world.

THE EXPERIENCE SOCIETY

The increased emphasis on experience that can be observed in visual

art since the 1960s is not limited to the aesthetic realm. It corresponds
to a general revaluation of experience in Western societies, in which
“experience” has become a focus of social, economic, and cultural
activity. This tendency has been discussed by various observers; its
most comprehensive analysis so far, however, comes from the
German sociologist Gerhard Schulze, according to whom the new
focus on the experiential must be understood in relation to the
profound economic transformations of Western societies in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. What Schulze refers to is
the transition from societies of lack to those of affluence, a process
that became apparent in North America in the 1950s and in Western
Europe in the 1960s. For the first time in the history of Western
civilizations, material needs were covered for a majority of the
population, a novelty that the British economist John Maynard Keynes
had predicted in the 1930s and that John Kenneth Galbraith
documented in the mid-1950s.
Even though the ecological and economic consequences of this
transformation have by now reached public consciousness, the cultural
impact—at least as an impact of this process—is much less present.
The transformation from a society of lack to a society of affluence,
according to Schulze, produces a change in the way individuals relate
to themselves. With the increase in both income and leisure time,
more and more people can (and need to) shape their lives according to
their own needs and preferences. People have to learn how to relate to
their living context in a mode of selection—and their selection criteria
are no longer primarily purpose-oriented—that is, driven by
necessity—but are also, and increasingly, aesthetic. When I choose, I
can choose according to necessity or taste. And in Western societies
since the 1950s and 1960s, the realm of the nonnecessary, the
aesthetic, has gained an extreme importance. The emerging affluent
society might still celebrate its new wealth—as they say, more is
more—but for the individual in the advanced affluent society,
aesthetic criteria, such as quality and intensity of experience, have
become a main point of orientation. It is important, however, to
understand this as a gradual project in a historical perspective. Schulze
does not claim that today we want (or are able) to orient our lives
according to our experiences. What he says is that a historical and
intercultural comparison reveals that there is now a relatively large
focus on experience for the construction of the social world.
Along with this shift toward immaterial and subject-related
concerns, a new “culture of being” arises: How do we want to live?
What does it mean to lead a good life today? What could be
“beautiful” relations? This new focus on the subject and the
intersubjective goes hand in hand with a changed relation to the
material world. In a society that is focused on the production of
goods—a society of lack, in other words—relating to things basically
means adjusting to their characteristics. In an affluent postindustrial
consumer society, the focus shifts from producing things to selecting
them. Choosing things, however, means that their criteria are adjusted
to me. This change of perspective leads to encounters with the self.
Aside from things, the subject finds the theme of itself. This is where
Schulze joins a discourse on the “technologies of the Self” (Michel
Foucault) and the “aesthetics of existence,” which has gained
increasing attention in recent years. This new focus on the subject and
on the techniques and practices of subjectivization has been largely
criticized, or even dismissed either as a new kind of fashion trend or—
as Ulrich Bröckling claims, for example—as a particularly refined
mode of economic self-exploitation. Schulze, in contrast, sees the turn
toward the subject as an urgent and necessary project demanding
public and rational debate, precisely because we don’t know how a
“culture of being” might look today. Modern Western societies were
primarily characterized by their attachment to what Schulze calls the
logic of expansion or the “cumulative game” (Steigerungsspiel)—to
perpetual technological, economic, and scientific progress and
innovation. The more saturated the status quo of scientific and
technological development, the more apparent becomes the necessity
for a different mode, one that is less determined by breaking
boundaries and expanding possibilities, and more oriented toward
ideas of how to shape and give form to the status quo. Schulze speaks
in this regard about the increasing significance of a “culture of arrival”
that needs to be acquired in a collective learning process. This,
according to Schulze, is the main challenge of contemporary Western
societies: the transition from a tradition of appropriating nature to the
creation of an appropriation of culture.
If we agree with Schulze’s analysis that a major characteristic of
our time is the fact that what historically was an upper-class
phenomenon—namely the cultivation of an aesthetics of existence—is
today a kind of mass phenomenon, then the “experience society”
ultimately has to be seen as a part of a huge movement of
democratization. With the increase of both income and leisure, more
people can and must engage with techniques and practices of the
self—the freedom to choose is also the obligation to choose. When
material needs are satisfied to a certain extent, inner experiences
become a focus of individual behavior, and a need for refinement, for
the shaping of character, arises. And the realm that answers to this
need is, in a secular society, no longer religion but the realm of
culture. This, to a certain extent, might explain why in Western
societies the aesthetic is gaining more and more significance for the
practice of life. A notion of the aesthetic, however, that slowly seems
to be loosening its obligatory tie to the object or artifact and
increasingly orienting itself to the subjective and intersubjective.
This is the broader social and cultural context within which we
have to see art’s transition from an aesthetic of the object to an
aesthetic of experience. And again we are speaking about a long
historical process that runs through modernity. A modern notion of
visual art developed along with the rise of bourgeois societies. And
what characterized the rising bourgeois culture, in opposition to the
preceding aristocratic and court cultures, was the attachment of the
individual to the material object. In aristocratic culture, objects played
a role too, as signs of taste, wealth, and status. But ultimately they
formed part of an aesthetics of manner and style; they accessorized a
subject that aimed to transform itself into another, more refined
personage. The aristocracy, however, was able to place such a high
premium on pursuits like conversation and sociability only because it
was exonerated from labor. And as Thorstein Veblen has shown, it
even needed to cultivate these practices in order to demonstrate that it
had plenty of free time, which clearly distinguished it from a
productive lower class that was concerned with covering its basic
requirements. The bourgeoisie, in contrast, saw itself as an integrative
organism whose progressive—one might even say revolutionary—
achievement was to create a social order in which the realms of
material production and aesthetic refinement were no longer mutually
exclusive, in which people worked and had access to culture. In this
new social order, cultural refinement and economic production
entered a kind of dialectical relationship. With the disappearance of
feudal bonds, wealth and status were no longer obtained by birthright
but were earned through labor and production. Just as material
production became the source of wealth for potentially everyone,
everyone should have access to the realm of cultural refinement, at
least in theory. The rise of material production as the dominant source
of wealth was accompanied by a new ambition to democratize culture,
which brought the fields of culture and production closer together. So
if bourgeois culture was essentially based on a connection between the
individual and the material object, then visual art became a kind of
practicing ground in which this specific connection between
materiality and subjectivity was both practiced and reflected on a
purpose-free level. Not only because the artwork itself has, as a
material object, a relation to the realm of material production—and
yet can also designate this object as a source of cultural significance
and aesthetic refinement—but also because the exhibition constituted
a kind of ritualistic cultivation of the idea of an individual who relates
to the material object.

How does the strong focus on presence

that comes with art’s turn to the
experiential relate to the idea of a
historical memory that is constituted by
and through art?
And just as the attachment of visual art to the material object
cultivated and refined bourgeois-industrial society’s groundedness in
material production, so did art’s “experiential turn”—and the new
focus on the perceiving, experiencing subject that came with it—
resonate with the fundamental economic and cultural transformations
of bourgeois-industrial societies in the late twentieth century. If
present-day Western societies are on their way to a postindustrial
social order, this development is mirrored in art’s shift from the object
toward the dimensions of subjective and intersubjective experience. It
is precisely these correspondences between art’s experiential turn and
the rise of “experiences” to a prime paradigm of Western societies in
the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that raise the central
question of a qualitative judgment of this new “experiential turn” in
visual art. And by this I mean not only the ability to decide between
aesthetic and nonaesthetic experiences, which is becoming more and
more virulent given that “experience” is now a focus of social,
economic, and cultural activity. I also mean questions about aesthetic
judgment, about quality and depth. Questions that until now have been
asked primarily in critical discourse: What, after all, is experienced?
The experience of having had an experience? Does the strong focus on
the subject play into the hands of a narcissistic consumer culture?
How does the strong focus on presence that comes with art’s turn to
the experiential relate to the idea of a historical memory that is
constituted by and through art?
Dan Flavin, Untitled (To Elizabeth and Richard Koshalek), 1971. Works for New Spaces, Walker Art Center,
1971. Photo: Eric Sutherland.

THE CRITIQUE OF THE EXPERIENTIAL

TURN

Schulze’s Experience Society was published in 1992. The empirical

data on which the book is based stem from the late 1980s. Critical
voices could argue that the diagnosis is too dated to be adequate for
the reality of the early twenty-first century, that economic crises and
the “new poverty” question the affluence of Western societies and the
search for “experience” as one of their main characteristics. There are,
however, two misconceptions inherent in this critique. The affluent
society is defined by the fact that its aggregate production is greater
than what its population can consume. This signifies a transition from
supply-driven to demand-driven markets. It does not mean that what is
produced is equally distributed or accessible. The fact that there is an
inequality of distribution that can and should be criticized does not
mean that Western societies are not structurally affluent societies. And
it is also empirically easy to prove that the experience-orientedness
that Schulze observes has even increased since his book came out—up
to the rise of the market and culture of experience that exist today.
Although Schulze’s fundamental diagnosis is still valid, the
author himself refined and updated his analysis in a recent lecture on
the subject. From today’s perspective, he differentiates between what
he calls the “early” and “late” experience societies and what can also
be defined as first-experience and second-experience societies. What
characterizes the first-experience society is the shift from outer to
inner goals described earlier, a shift that gives the central role to the
subject, which seeks happiness in experiential stimulation. Reviewing
this phenomenon today, Schulze adopts a more critical tone that
incorporates some of the cultural critique of the supposedly
narcissistic and individualistic focus on experiences:
In early experience society, instrumental thinking conquered the new
pattern. Rationality of experience was born: a collection of common
strategies to maximize and perfect experiences. A rapidly expanded
market of experience trained and stabilized this rationality of
experience. In a collective learning process, consumers and suppliers
established four simple techniques of psychophysical stimulation:
accumulation, variation, escalation, and coding opportunities of
experience. … In late experience society, however, these techniques
have largely lost their potency, like addictive drugs. People are still
dedicated to the pursuit of happiness. They still define the sense of life
in psychophysical terms. The good life is still conceived as one of
intense, fascinating experiences. But there are increasing tones of
criticism, boredom, disgust, and hostility.

Like Zygmunt Bauman and others, Schulze points to a kind of

dead end of the subject’s turning to the self in the attempt to invert the
self-centered perspective and open it to a new direction: to understand
the work on the self as something that requires an involvement with
something outside it, with projects and content. The shift toward inner
goals that Schulze had defined as the main characteristic of
contemporary Western societies is now recognized as a path that does
not turn away from the outside but, conversely, presupposes an
engagement with it.
Interestingly, there is a connection between Schulze’s critique of
the experience society and a critique of the experiential turn of art that
was raised by the art historian Rosalind Krauss. As Krauss writes in
her essay “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,”
published in 1990, the phenomenological orientation toward
experience, something that she elaborates primarily in reference to
Robert Morris’s sculptures, brought with it not only a new approach to
the physicality of the body but even a kind of compensatory, if not
utopian, gesture as well. A viewer-subject, alienated in everyday life
from his or her own experiences, was to be realigned with them
through the experience of art. “This,” Krauss says, “is because the
Minimalist subject is in this very displacement returned to its body, re-
grounded in a kind of richer, denser subsoil of experience than the
paper-thin layer of an autonomous visuality that had been the goal of
optical painting.”
In time Krauss revised her original position, acknowledging that
the promise of Minimal Art not only remained unredeemed but had to
a certain extent turned into its opposite as well. Looking back, she no
longer considered Minimal Art to be the seedbed of a richer form of
art experience but rather saw it as having paved the way for its own
depletion. Because the Minimal Art object focuses not only on the
viewer’s body but also on the surrounding situation—that is, the
exhibition context—this desubstantiation of the art experience also
impacts the museum. For what in the final instance is bereft of content
is, Krauss suggests, the historical dimension of the art experience or,
more specifically, a dimension that references the historical. She
became aware of this when, in the United States at the end of the
1980s, the social function of the museum profoundly changed. A new
tax law enabled objects to be sold from collections; this affected the
status of the museum collection, as did new spatial concepts and new
museum design and presentation forms. Krauss quotes Thomas Krens,
then the director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, a key
protagonist in this change, who specifically referred to Minimal Art in
explaining these developments: “It is Minimalism that has reshaped
the way we … look at art: the demands we now put on it; our need to
experience it along with its interaction with the space in which it
exists; our need to have a cumulative, serial crescendo towards the
intensity of this experience; our need to have more and at a larger
scale.” Krens understood that conventional museum architecture was
unable to provide the kind of experience that these Minimal objects
required. The sculptures prompted him to opt for new design
paradigms, preparing and anticipating new spatial concepts that took
their cue from warehouses and factories and presentation formats that
were geared toward comprehensive monographic shows. “Compared
to the scale of the Minimalist objects, the earlier paintings and
sculptures look impossibly tiny and inconsequential, like postcards,
and the galleries take on a fussy, crowded, culturally irrelevant look,
like so many curio shops,” Krauss observed.
When, in 1989, Krauss visited the Panza Collection in Paris and
saw an exhibition of works by artists such as Robert Morris, Dan
Flavin, and Carl Andre, she realized that Minimal Art indeed heralded
a “radical revision” of the museum. The powerful presence of these
objects, she wrote, rendered the exhibition space itself the object of an
experience. For the viewers, the museum itself thus becomes an
objectified and abstract entity “from which the collection has
withdrawn.” This experience, as Krauss explains, is very intense and
effective but in the final instance remains essentially empty, as it is
merely aesthetically and not historically determined. The experience
evoked by the Minimal Art object is oriented toward an individual
who constitutes himself or herself in the act of perception and hence
only temporarily, from one moment to the next. This aesthetic
experience, in its radical contingency and its dependence on the
conditions of the space and its respective situation, creates a specific
kind of subjective experience but not one that can (or intends to)
anchor the individual in the coordinates of history. This experience of
the self is one that neither is nor can be historically underpinned. With
Minimal Art, Krauss argues, the museum becomes a space for a new
spatial-aesthetic dimension of experience but is no longer one in
which history, or rather the individual’s rootedness in history, can be
experienced: “The encyclopedic museum is intent on telling a story,
by arranging before its visitor a particular version of the history of art.
The synchronic museum—if we can call it that—would forgo history
in the name of a kind of intensity of experience, an aesthetic charge
that is not so much temporal (historical) as it is now radically spatial.”
Precisely because these objects engender an experience that
remains contingent and does not refer to an essentially stable subject,
this experience cannot give rise to a cultural context as traditionally
represented by the museum. Instead of “reconciling” the individual
with his or her own experiences, Minimal Art, according to Krauss,
ultimately serves to underscore what she calls the “utterly fragmented,
postmodern subject of contemporary mass culture,” which no longer
finds the terrain for experience within a historical trajectory. In other
words, it nurtures an individual subjugated to spectacle.
Minimal Art—albeit not in factual terms (as with happenings or
Fluxus events) but in regard to its underlying conception—indeed
does not fit into the customary model of history used in museums.
Although Minimal artworks can be seen today as belonging to a
specific time and can be represented as such, in terms of their
conception they initially excluded a specific type of reference to
history. Minimal Art maintains a position beyond the historical
determinacy of art and thus also refuses, to a certain extent, to fit into
a museum as the mise-en-scène of a sequence of historically
determined artifacts. In a certain way, Minimal Art robs this historical
narrative of content because it shifts the meaning of artworks onto the
essentially general and indeterminate level of effect. But just as
Minimal artworks are abstract—with their geometric shapes and
qualities as pure objects—and seem to maintain a position outside the
representational conventions outlined in art history, so too does the
experience of viewing these artworks remain abstract. This becomes
clear, for example, in Tony Smith’s oft-cited anecdote of his nighttime
experience on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. Smith drove down
the empty road and reported how this experience, for him, was quasi-
aesthetic in nature yet also shattered all customary aesthetic order.
“There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it,” is
how he put it, and it was clear to him that a reformulation of the
aesthetic would also provoke a fundamental change in the conception
of art, transgressing the aesthetic experience in a way that was
universal. It was precisely this universality that ultimately rendered
the experience of these works indeterminate and general.
 When Krauss’s essay was published in German in the
journal Texte zur Kunst in 1992, it was prefaced by a film still from
the absurd Hollywood romantic comedy L.A. Story, in which the
favorite pastime of the protagonist, played by Steve Martin, is
speeding on roller skates through museums, something he does twice
in the course of the film. He races first through the historical
collections at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and then
through the galleries of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles. Euphoric, he enjoys his aesthetic buzz through art history, in
which the individual artworks pass him by almost like a film. The
antithesis of the museum as the location of a collective, historical-
cultural memory—as described in Jürgen Habermas’s model of the
bourgeois institution intended to enable visitors to experience the
formation of the bourgeois individual as a process rooted in history—
can hardly be better shown: here the museum becomes the site of the
potential for hedonistic experience in which a subject is not
constituted but lost through viewing cultural heritage.

RATIONALIZATION AND
RESIGNIFICATION OF EXPERIENCE

In different ways, and from very different perspectives, both Schulze

and Krauss point to an important premise of the experiential turn,
which does not imply a turn away from meaning, discourse, and
content but rather points to a connection of meaning production to
experience—to the viewer’s situated and embodied experience. It
leads to a concept of situated knowledge, an understanding of
meaning as something that is always and inseparably linked to a
situated and embodied subject. Correspondingly, the turn toward the
subject and his or her experiences does not imply a narcissistic turn to
the self. The work with and on the self presupposes an engagement
with outer projects or content in the same way that such an
engagement with projects or content also implies or leads to work on
oneself.
In the final part of this essay I would like to focus on the question
of how to translate such a concept of experience in the realm of the
aesthetic. What does it imply for art? How can experience be charged
with meaning, significance, and content? How can a
phenomenological model of experience, as outlined at the beginning
of this essay, and a semiological model of experience be connected?
How can experiences be linked to their own historical, contextual, and
epistemological origins? And I will present two artworks that, I think,
propose at least some answers to these questions: James Coleman’s
filmic installation Box (ahhareturnabout)from 1977 and Tino Sehgal’s
constructed situation This objective of that object from 2004.

Box is a work that very strongly cites and involves the body.
From a distance we can already hear a hollow beat fighting its way
through the exhibition space like blood pumped through the body by a
beating heart. Once we enter the space, this beat reaches the limit of
the tolerable; the rhythm almost violently takes possession of the
visitor’s body. The space is very dark. At regular intervals it brightens
for fractions of a second, allowing a glimpse of scenes from a boxing
match. The visual staccato of stark black-and-white contrasts is no
less violent to the eye than the acoustic beat is to the rest of the body.
While the beat pulsates from an enormous loudspeaker, words and
fragmented sentences like “Do it—again, again—stop, s-t-o-p, return
… aha/aha, ah … go, go on … again, again,” spoken by a male voice,
can be heard from another loudspeaker. Commands, a description of
the fear and doubt and pain of the fight, are repeated as if someone
were thinking out loud, interspersed with loud breathing or gasping.
Box is Coleman’s only work that is based on documentary
material. The images in this artwork are taken from footage of a fight
between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey, to which the artist added
regular black film frames. The fight, which took place in Chicago on
September 22, 1927, is legendary in the history of boxing. It was a
rematch between two world heavyweight champions. Jack Dempsey
was one of the most famous athletes of his time. Renowned for his
lightning-speed punches, he held the heavyweight title for almost
seven years. He was known as the Caveman and was considered
unbeatable, but in 1926 he lost the world championship to an
unknown fighter, Gene Tunney, who was the complete opposite of
Dempsey: intellectual, good-looking, and aesthetically refined. The
rematch a year later, awaited with great excitement, was to go down in
boxing history as one of the most spectacular fights of its time. And
the impossible happened again: Tunney won. But at the moment of the
fight, everything was at stake for him. He had to win a second time to
keep his title; at the moment of the fight he had his status, yet at the
same time he did not.
James Coleman, Box (ahhareturnabout), 1977, 16mm film (black-and-white, synchronized audio), continuous loop.
Collection Walker Art Center, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1991, 1991.96.

In Coleman’s installation, the flarelike flashing sequences of

images are so brief that it is impossible to follow the course of the
match. Rather than proceeding toward a climax, the sequence of
images presents a continuous repetitive loop. The poor quality of the
documentary material, the interference, and the disjointed movements
of the figures indicate that the footage is vintage. In a vague, coded
manner, this suggests a historical and local anchoring of the work,
which, however, never becomes concrete and fades behind the
aesthetic impact of the work’s visual and acoustic stimuli. Walter
Benjamin, in his concepts of corporeal space (Leibraum) and visual
space (Bildraum), developed a vision of a mechanism that absorbed
the subject, of an image that, as Sigrid Weigel writes, “moves in on
the subject and materializes in physical innervations.” Similarly, in
this work Coleman connects the perceptual apparatus to the
spectator’s body and links the mechanism to a visual-aural experience.
With the pulse of the beat in one’s own body and the drama of the
spoken word, one has the feeling of being both in the body and in the
consciousness of the boxer. At this moment the division between inner
and outer becomes permeable—as with the boxer, who is isolated and
at the same time the center of a nervous, energetically charged
perceptual field directed by a public. Coleman orchestrates a
(visitor’s) body, which forms a bond with the visual and acoustic
apparatus. It seems as if we, the viewers, penetrate the body of the
boxer, just as the visual/aural apparatus penetrates our bodies. It is this
fusion of the body and the cinematographic apparatus that—for a
moment—produces the impression of the historical event not being
depicted or represented but rather rendered present and suspended in
the aesthetic experience. The rhythmic principle of this artwork seems
to unite the two levels of time that play a role in Box, those
of experienced time and historical time, which are both mediated in
the viewer’s bodily and aesthetic experience.
 With the title Box, Coleman alludes to the distinctive
iconographic feature of Minimal Art and, at the same time, to its
spatial orientation to the viewer’s body. Yet while in Minimal Art the
experience is that of a body standing indeterminately outside of
power, sexuality, and history, Coleman, in contrast, gives experience a
historical-materialist contour. He introduces a dimension of
experience that does not exclude meaning, language, critique, and
history but gives these categories a concrete form as a necessary basis
for all experience. The subject is presented in a sociogeopolitical
context and at the same time is enacted on the uncontrolled level of
affect and physicality. The body is therefore conceived as material, as
a bearer of meaning and, simultaneously, as a psychophysiological
being. In a radically discontinuous way, Coleman forges links
between subjective experience and a specific historical event. He thus
determines experience in two ways. First, he constructs the aesthetic
in terms of a temporal structure, forming a discontinuous constellation
of the present and the past. Second, by alluding to a specific historical
event and by employing and reflecting on the specific dissecting and
shocklike abilities of the filmic medium, he focuses attention on the
transformations that emerge, through the course of history, in the
structure of experience itself. The experience of the artwork is
refracted in a reflection on the historical, cultural, and media origins
of this experience. Coleman lends aesthetic experience a specific
historical-materialist thrust. The powerful experience of the artwork is
pinned to the moment of perception, and yet it has a grounding in
history, or rather it bears the historical within it, bringing this into the
present by linking it with the testimony of a specific event, charged
with all the tensions and contradictions that form an actual historical
situation.

“The objective of this work is to become

the object of a discussion.”
 Tino Sehgal’s This objective of that object is based on a formal
structure that involves and engages the visitor in a communicative,
intersubjective experience. As with all of Sehgal’s works, This
objective of that object is enacted by different people during the entire
opening hours of an exhibition. The viewer enters an empty exhibition
space and is slowly encircled by five people walking backward one
after the other toward the visitor from hidden corners, stopping at a
distance of about three to four meters in a circular formation. They all
have their backs to the visitor and breathe heavily in a synchronous
rhythm. What is at first a barely audible murmur turns into a phrase
delivered in unison and repeated insistently: “The objective of this
work is to become the object of a discussion.” The louder this
sentence is spoken, the more emphatic it sounds, like a demand, with
increasingly long pauses between each utterance.
This is the prologue of an artwork that aspires to provoke its own
commentary. If the visitor does not comment or shows no reaction, the
players collapse after a few minutes. Their voices become weak as
they slowly sink to the floor and, as if with their dying breath, utter for
a last time: “The objective … of this work … is to become … the
object … of … a discussion.” That is it. Then, in silence, the players
lie lifeless on the floor. Without comment, without communication,
the artwork has no life force. But as soon as something occurs or is
said, they stand up again and excitedly say: “We have a comment, we
have a comment. Who will answer, who will answer?” Then one of
them answers, “Me” or “I will,” which initiates a discussion among
them. The players discuss—always remaining in circular formation
with their backs to the visitor—the possible meanings and
implications of the visitor’s comment. As the comments are likely to
be different, the discussions vary considerably. One I experienced was
initiated by the frequent question: “Why do the players always remain
with their backs turned,” which led to a conversation about the
cultural significance of eye contact. The sudden ringing of a cell
phone, laughter, a comment in a foreign language, can become the
beginning of another discussion. The players interpret the visitors’
comments in a way that is similar to the way a critic would discuss an
artwork. Although the visitors are able to influence the course of the
discussion by contributing to what is being said or by interjecting a
comment, they nonetheless never attain a position equal to that of the
players, in part because of the formal arrangement of the situation.

The stratification that Sehgal constructs with this work is a

strange mix between conversation and sculpture or a social situation
and its aesthetics. The visitors are crucial and constitutive to the
work—without their comments the main part could not take place. If
no comment is made, the work does not go beyond the unvarying
prologue. The artwork needs to become an object of reflection, just as
the visitors have to become the object of the conversation that they
witness; it is as if the work of art were holding up a mirror to the
observer. In this way artwork and reception are in an infinite feedback
loop, with a fragile and constantly negotiated power relation between
the players and the visitors that, to a certain extent, is directed by
Sehgal’s dramaturgy and mise-en-scène. If there were five pairs of
eyes directed at them, the visitors would be subjected to a completely
different kind of power. The fact that the players face the wall is
crucial, as it allows the visitors to perceive this formation as
something constructed and aesthetic. This spatial configuration creates
a kind of equilibrium between those enacting and those visiting. The
players know what is to be done, and the visitors can identify the
players. Since the players always face the walls and do not have a
complete overview of the changing situation, they cannot be aware of
things like nonverbal communication between visitors. “It’s
something between ballet and chess,” one visitor commented, and
indeed the work functions like a spatial and formal game that the
visitors try to understand and also to control. “The visitors are trying
to play a game on us,” one player said, as a number of visitors drove
her into a corner in an attempt to see her face, thereby altering the
spatial configuration of the work.
What these works by Coleman and Sehgal exemplify is the
difference between artworks that produce an experience (which
basically any artwork does) and artworks that shape experiences. With
these works, experiences had with the work become an integral
part of the work. The meaning of these works manifests itself in an
experience. And thus both works also point to ways in which
experiences can be charged with signification. Coleman does this
through a dialectical approach to experiences, which are produced and
shaped and at the same time reflected in their historical, cultural,
social, and medial origin. Referring to Foucault’s concept of
“archaeology,” in a radically discontinuous way he constructs links
between subjective experience and specific historical events, relating
in turn to media and general cultural phenomena in the history of
modernity. Sehgal works with experiences that are generated by and
within an aesthetically shaped, social, and intersubjective situation. If
games, according Schulze, constitute an important realm in which
work on the self takes place, Sehgal inserts the visitor, in his or her
communicative actions, into a game that radicalizes and challenges the
“old” game of the museum as a place for the formation and self-
formation of the individual.
The museum has always been a place that changes and transforms
itself according to profound changes in the socioeconomic order upon
which it is based. As long as this order was determined by premises of
production and progress, the exhibition was able to be the privileged
site for ritually performing a subjective encounter with objects.
Historically it was an institution of liberal government in which
essential values of modern subjectivity could be practiced and enacted
vis-à-vis the material object. In this sense, Tony Bennett calls the
exhibited objects “props for a performance in which a progressive,
civilizing relationship to the self might be formed and worked
upon.” From the 1960s onward, there seems to have been a strong
 tendency in visual art to connect to and at the same time challenge this
formative effect of the museum. The exhibition, once conceived as a
space dedicated to cultivating our most sophisticated relationships to
objects, now proposes an aesthetic experience that is no longer work-
related but self-related. The object, traditionally the protagonist of
meaning production, becomes a device for engaging in an
experimental relation with oneself and others. If we understand this
turn toward the production and shaping of experiences today as an
adjustment to the present state of Western societies, this, at best, could
restore a discourse that enables art to become productive beyond its
own boundaries in a project of a “culture of being.” Yet the subject of
this experience is not of worldless and timeless universality; it is
rather conceived as situated and contextualized, establishing a notion
of aesthetic experience that is able to connect to the social and cultural
contexts of art.

Dorothea von Hantelmann teaches art history at the Freie

Universität Berlin. She is a member of the Berlin-based Collaborative
Research Centre Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic
Limits. Her main fields of research are contemporary art and
aesthetics as well as the history and social function of exhibitions. Her
publications include How to Do Things with Art: The Meaning of
Art’s Performativity (JRP|Ringier, 2010); Die Ausstellung: Politik
eines Ritual, edited with C. Meister (Diaphanes, 2010); and Notes on
the Exhibition: 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts(Hatje Cantz, 2012),
published in conjunction with dOCUMENTA (13).
ENDNOTES
1. John Langshaw Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard
University in 1955, ed. J. O. Urmson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962).↩
2. Oskar Bätschmann, Ausstellungskünstler (Cologne: DuMont, 1997).↩
3. Jérôme Sans, Daniel Buren: Au sujet de…; Entretien avec Jérôme Sans (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 126.↩
4. Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October 54 (Autumn 1990): 9.↩
5. Quoted in Jon Bird, “Minding the Body: Robert Morris’s 1971 Tate Gallery Retrospective,” in Rewriting
Conceptual Art, ed. Michael Newman and Jon Bird (London: Reaktion, 1999), 97.↩
6. Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (Cambridge, MA: Zone, 1997).↩
7. See the conversation between Robert Irwin and Michael Govan at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in
1999, http://www.artbabble.org/video/lacma/robert-irwin-and-michael-govan-lacma.↩
8. Dan Graham, Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art, ed. Alexander Alberro
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 174.↩
9. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 234.↩
10. Carsten Höller: Test Site, The Unilever Series, Tate Modern, October 10, 2006–April 15,
2007, http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/unilever-series-carsten-holler-test-site.↩
11. See, for example, Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992); Zygmunt
Bauman, The Art of Life (Cambridge: Polity, 2008); B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore, The Experience
Economy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999). For a groundbreaking historical perspective, see the
sociological analyses of Georg Simmel.↩
12. Gerhard Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft (Frankfurt: Campus, 1992). [Published in English as The Experience
Society (London: Sage, 2005).↩
13. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (1930), in Essays in Persuasion (New
York: Norton, 1963); John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958).↩
14. Schulze, Erlebnisgesellschaft, 38ff.↩
15. Ulrich Bröckling, Das unternehmerische Selbst (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007).↩
16. Steigerungsspiel is a paradigm of progression and increase that not only refers to economic horizons but also
includes modes of thinking and acting in their totality.↩
17. See also Gerhard Schulze, Die beste aller Welten (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2004), 38.↩
18. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Mentor, 1953).↩
19. Gerhard Schulze, “Searching Ground: Patterns of Self-Transcendence in Late Experience Society,” keynote lecture at
the Fourth Nordic Conference on Cultural Policy Research, Jyväskylä, Finland, August 19–22, 2009.↩
20. Krauss, “Cultural Logic,” 3–17.↩
21. Ibid., 9.↩
22. Ibid., 7.↩
23. Ibid., 4.↩
24. Ibid.↩
25. Ibid., 7.↩
26. Ibid., 12.↩
27. Quoted in Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998), 158.↩
28. Rosalind Krauss, “Die kulturelle Logik des spätkapitalistischen Museums,” Texte zur Kunst, no. 6 (June 1992):
131–145.↩
29. Sigrid Weigel, Entstellte Ähnlichkeit: Walter Benjamins theoretische Schreibweise (Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer, 1997), 114–120.↩
30. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972).↩
31. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995), 186.↩