Parse Journal (Aug 2021)
The Modern Paradigm, the Exhibitionary Form and Our Epistemological Crisis
Abstract
Taking exhibition as a transparent construct maintains a theoretical pact through which the exhibitionary form and its modern/colonial roots are glossed over. My research proposes to critically appraise the exhibitionary form and its ideological infrastructure, starting from the concurrent birth of Western modernity and the art exhibition as a cultural device, and asking if the exhibitionary form can be used to critique modernity as a socio-cultural phenomenon. This article draws on a series of epistemological reviews of modernity—Bruno Latour’s, Bonaventura de Sousa Santos’s and Paul B. Preciado’s—to frame such a critique. I use two recent shows as examples in which the exhibitionary form emerges as a locus for epistemological otherness. In Cecilia Szalkowicz’s “Soy un disfraz de tigre” and Adrián Villar Rojas’s The Theater of Disappearance, human and non-human bodies enact the exhibition’s architecture. In these examples, a critique of the modern world view transpires through the exhibitionary form.
