From Wunderkammer to Szeemann and Back: The Artistic Research Exposition as Performative and Didactic Experience

Summary

In November 2011, the artistic research project ‘The Monkey's World. Towards an archaeology of baroque culture’ reached its culmination in (Exhibiting) Baroque Bodies, a one-week festival at the Brussels-based interdisciplinary arts centre, Beursschouwburg. The festival consisted of a theatre production by the Belgian company Abattoir Ferme and Pol Dehert, the exhibition ‘Corpus Rochester’ on contemporary baroque culture (featuring work by, among many other artists, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Angelo Vermeulen, David Bade, Jan Van Imschoot, Johan Muyle, Pol Dehert, Patricia Canino, etc.), a late-night programme of films and performances focusing on the idea of the political, the burlesque and the pornographic body, and a series of workshops through which film and theatre students were involved in the research questions of this project.

(Exhibiting) Baroque Bodies was more than just the presentation of the concrete results of an elaborate research project; it was also an attempt to find an adequate and challenging form to allow additional insight into the process that led to the result presented, an exposition (perhaps the German word Auseinandersetzung is a more apt term), that simultaneously exposed the complex dramaturgical and historical research and the actual artistic ‘labour’ or research. It aimed at the integration of research, presentation and pedagogy, the festival being a shared experience of co-creation, discussion and collaboration, a utopian moment during which the institutionally accepted differences between teachers, students, researchers and artists became of secondary importance. This mixture of presenting (exhibiting) and experiencing (living) research results formed the heart of our research exposition. (Exhibiting) Baroque Bodies was conceived as a hybrid experience during which live events were integrated in the context of an exhibition, and vice versa, the exhibition aimed at a theatrical impact. In other words, the mode of presentation became part of the research process as we tried to find an event that could bring us closer to our real research object, the permanently shifting world that we describe as ‘baroque’. (Exhibiting) Baroque Bodies was thus both an experience and a moment of meta-reflection, investigating its own status as a performative moment.