theanyspacewhatever is an exhibition that aims to provide a retrospective view on a range of artistic practices that emerged in the 1990s. What unites these practices, regardless of the different stylistic and aesthetic strategies they employ, is the way they turn the idea of an art exhibition into a dynamic medium of sociability and collaboration. To exemplify this practice, Nancy Spector, the Guggenheim’s chief curator, invited ten contemporary artists to collectively formulate a group exhibition for the museum. The artists—Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija—are well known for their individual and collaborative projects. Together they decided not to create a traditional retrospective exhibition or a collective project, but to produce an individual site-specific works for the museum’s space. The installation in the museum is also accompanied by a series of events, including a screening of Anna Sanders Films, a production company founded by, among others, Huyghe and Parreno, to foster links between cinema and the visual arts, and a special publication of The Wrong Times, an annual newspaper that accompanies the activities of The Wrong Gallery, a curatorial project by Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, and Ali Subotnick.

As Spector suggests in her introductory catalogue essay, theanyspacewhatever is an exhibition that marks a shift in contemporary artistic practices from the “theory-laden” and self-reflexive art of the 1980s to the inherently playful, open-ended and elusive art of the 1990s (13). Hence the title of the exhibition, suggested by Gillick, evokes the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze that is itself based on notions of multiplicity, heterogeneity, and difference. The term “any-space-whatever” is taken from Deleuze’s cinema studies and refers to an open principle of connectivity between heterogeneous images of spaces and actions that informs modern cinema. In the context of the exhibition, it is meant to suggest the idea of temporal potentiality and the fact that in the 1990s it was no longer issues of representation that occupied artists, but instead modes of social interaction and formats of cultural activities. Whereas in the 1980s artists such as Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Sherrie Levine employed appropriation in order to investigate the way forms of representation are underlined by hegemonic ideologies, in the 1990s artists no longer criticize institutions but creatively intervene in the activities and operations that take place within them. It was the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud who theorized this form of artistic practice under the name “relational aesthetics” (Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002).

Yet, theanyspacewhatever takes place after the critical premises of “relational aesthetics” as outlined by Bourriaud were challenged, most notably by the journal October in a quite devastating essay by Claire Bishop who argued, based on the political philosophy of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, that the concepts of communality and sociability supporting Bourriaud’s theory and the works of Gillick and Tiravanija are utopian, if not naive, because they fail to acknowledge the conflicted and antagonistic nature of democratic forms of association (Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 [Fall 2004]: 51–80). In many ways, theanyspacewhatever—the exhibition, the catalogue, and a day-long session on the art of the 1990s that took place in conjunction with the exhibition (and to which Bishop was invited)—constitute a response to this critique. The question thus inevitably becomes whether this response is adequate in the sense that it offers a new critical and theoretical perspective from which to reconsider “relational aesthetics” and the artists whose works became associated with it. In other words, do these “elusive and allusive works,” as Spector defines them (13–14), in fact propose, however contingently or ephemerally, a form of artistic practice that engages with the main challenges facing contemporary art in the age of enforced consensus and unprecedented forms of sovereign power? Or do they simply mark an “autonomous” site of friendship and collaboration whose activities and events are of interest only to this designated group of artists and the curators and critics who provide their work with visibility and publicity?

In relation to these concerns, the exhibition, as opposed to the fascinating and thought-provoking catalogue, fails to register the varied productive strategies that were employed by these artists in their previous projects. The decision to focus on individual site-specific works for the imposing space and impossible architecture of the Guggenheim is basically self-defeating, especially when considering the way this group of artists challenged precisely this idea of an exhibition as a static spatial display of objects, instead turning it into a temporal chain of activities and events through which it becomes a magazine, a film, a television broadcast, etc. It is also very difficult while visiting the exhibition to ignore the major role the Guggenheim museum has played in the transformation of exhibition spaces into “entertainment-parks” through the use of exhibition design gimmicks such as, among others, painting the museum black on the occasion of a 2001 survey of Brazilian art. Thus whether it is seen as an unintentional effect of theanyspacewhatever and its specific mode of installment within the Guggenheim, or it is interpreted as the inevitable outcome of the genuine effort the artists have made to connect the visual arts with modern design, cinema, architecture, and theater, the result here seems to be—and this is one of the still-viable insights institutional critique offers—not an invigorating encounter between “art and life” but an uncritical evaporation of art into design within global commercial marketing strategies.

It is also unfortunate that many artists chose not to create new works but to present a highly faded and decontextualized version of previous projects. For example, Gordon exhibits his provocative text pieces which are printed directly on the wall and include sentences like “nothing will ever be the same,” “I remember more than you know,” and “are we evil.” The power of Gordon’s performative use of language is that it affects the viewer by becoming an internal and external “voice” simultaneously commanding and seducing. The problem in theanyspacewhatever is that the exhibition space is simply flooded with these texts which achieve their power precisely because they are unexpected, the visitor unguardedly encountering them. Here they become not forms of intersubjective address but decorative repetitious elements that punctuate the space without any consideration of the visitor’s experience.

Also reinstalled is Gordon’s joint project with Tiravanija, Cinéma Liberté/Bar Lounge, which the artists originally operated in a specific rented place for the duration of Manifesta I in 1996. The current work consists of screenings of politically censored films in a sitting area with coffee served by illy. The idea is to transform the exhibition space into a public forum that enables discussion and debate. Yet, interaction and sociability are not “props” that can simply be added to a work of art. They are not the outcome of design and installation, but of specific situations that generate social interaction. It is precisely these kinds of works that triggered critique in the first place, and it is surprising to see that no effort has been made to engage with it in the exhibition.

Other works aim to subtly transform the exhibition space through minor interventions that open it to different virtual modalities of experience. Gillick created a series of hanging aluminum signs that mimic and divert the functional and imperative institutional language of museum signs. His minimal signs “poeticize” or “narrativize” the space by implementing obscure clues like “a piano and black snow,” “fish or cat bait,” or by making suggestions such as “stay here sometimes.” Similarly, Gonzalez-Foerster, in her installation Promendade, which includes sounds of a rain storm, “tropicalizes” the space and shifts the viewer into different temporal and spatial realms. Bulloch aims to transform the exhibition venue by inserting into the museum’s oculus an LED-powered light-installation that resembles a starry night sky, thus perceptually opening the space’s physical boundaries. All of these subtle works seem to be caught within what Dorothea von Hantelmann, in her catalogue essay on Gonzalez-Foerster, calls the “museum effect.” While the artists in theanyspacewhatever try to reconfigure the art object’s mode of functioning by restoring its intersubjective and social capacities, this effort, she argues, is almost impossible to realize in a museum context that does exactly the opposite, namely “uplifts the object to an autonomous center stage position” (59).

This problematic occurs in two other installations. Pardo has created a labyrinth of interlocking intricate screens illuminated by matching lamps. These screens form an independent exhibition space for the display of silk-screened prints produced by the artists for the exhibition. While the aim is to occasion a detour in the visitor’s walking route, Pardo’s “object” in fact uncritically mimics the spiral space of the Guggenheim using the same kind of means, namely design. Höller has created a luxurious hotel room that visitors can reserve and spend the night in the museum. The room is composed of four rotating discs that mark different activity areas: sleeping, dressing, and eating. Höller’s work, in opposition to Pardo, takes into consideration “the museum effect” and the way it materially and conceptually “uplifts” its objects, even ones that are temporal, while also inseparably linking its operations to issues of social class and design.

Parreno recorded an audio-guide tour for the show that tirelessly lists the canonical works of the participants and their collaborative projects. This work, together with Tiravanija’s documentary film CHEW THE FAT, which includes interviews with the participating artists, provides a retrospective view for the exhibition. At the same time, these works expose the gap between the artists’ previous or ongoing ambitious projects (like Tiravanija’s The Land or Huyghe’s and Parreno’s No Ghost Just a Shell) and their faded traces in the exhibition. But it is ultimately the comprehensive catalogue that provides the illuminating overview and context for these artists and their work. It is composed from monographic texts on the artists by scholars and critics as well as texts that focus on key exhibitions and collaborative projects by individuals, mostly curators, who were directly involved in them. What makes the catalogue such a valuable and illuminating scholarly text is the way it does not refrain from including contributions that reassess the projects they address and offer new critical perspectives to the debate surrounding “relational aesthetics” in a way that is productive as opposed to a clear-cut binary: either celebratory or accusatory. For example, Francesco Bonami examines the critical viability of the different manifestations of The Wrong Gallery; Hal Foster reconsiders Höller’s reconfiguration of the museum as an entertainment site; Ina Blom suggests a fascinating interpretation to Gillick’s notion of sociality; and Bourriaud offers a response to Bishop’s text. On the one hand, the catalogue includes a highly critical text by Oliver Zahm that states: “Relational aesthetics is in my mind the motif of the End of Art as an autonomous category in favor of a communication and generalized artistic dissolution that reduces all artistic virulence to live event-making, cheap multimedia, and installationism” (140). On the other hand, it includes an astonishing uncritical text by Molly Nesbit who states in relation to the traveling exhibition Utopia Station: “Everything becomes part of the exhibition; the exhibition extends into the ground of everything and everybody present. Nothing is fatally separated from anything else” (226). It is between these two positions that the critical viability of “relational aesthetics” and the art of the 1990s will ultimately be located.