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The future of art belongs to the mechanisms, pleasures and powers of the invitation card. Let me explain.
The invitation card, faster and more broadly distributed than the exhibition it broadcasts, is deployed by the administrative offices of galleries and museums to do the work (publicity, branding, promotion, etc.) that the art does not do. This makes the invitation card both the poor cousin of the art and its biggest threat. To understand this, though, we have to do back a step and analyse the event that the invitation card announces.
Despite appearances, the terms opening and private view are interchangeable in art's calendar. This is because opening does not refer to a quality of the event, in which perhaps it might contrast with the closure of a private view; opening identifies the sequence of events. The opening or private view is the inaugural event of an exhibition: when the gallery is open before it is open.
The opening, in this special sense, immediately precedes the opening of the exhibition. Before the gallery is open to the public, then, the gallery is already open. But if the gallery is not open to the public, then to whom is it open? Prior to public viewing of the exhibition, another public, a putatively private public, enters the gallery for a pre-viewing. The private view is private only insofar as it precedes the opening of the exhibition to the public. It is by virtue of arriving early that this public is inscribed as private.
In other words, the alleged privacy of the private view is not due to the character of the public that attends the preview. On the contrary, it is the timing of the private view - the view as preview - that accords the public of the private view its character as private (simply by virtue of preceding the public - a purely mechanical distinction, we might say). The private public and the public public are indistinguishable except by the time when they attend the gallery. There are not two publics in existence prior to the event to which the distinction between the preview and the public view corresponds.
There is not a constituency of the public that the exhibition opens itself to prior to the opening of the exhibition to the public. Quite the reverse. The opening or private view is the event that enacts a particular codification of the public. A public, in the guise of its differentiation from the public, is differentiated from the public through its attendance of the preview. It is possible that the effect of such a differentiation is to characterise the private public as special; it is not, however, the character of the private public that sets it apart, it is its being set apart that calls for the explanation of why it is set apart which may result in the speculation that the private public has a special character.
Of course, inaugurations are not originary. The inaugural event that precedes and announces the exhibition is in turn preceded by the announcement itself, namely, the invitation or private view card. In order for the inaugural event (the private view) to be inaugural, then, the preceding events (the distribution of the private view card, the compilation of a mailing list, etc.) has to be drained of significance, neglected and suppressed through neglect. How is the glamour of priority held by the private view prevented from being attached to the private view card, too? Why is value conferred on the preview for preceding the exhibition, while the private view card, which precedes the private view, is remote from the power of art? The reason the private view seems to be originary, then, is because the events that precede it are codified as insignificant.
Within the wider field of cultural strategies and techniques, the invitation card fails to signify except as a peripheral device. It is art's version of the movie trailer: the attention-seeking servant of that which purportedly deserves the attention (the movie, or art). If value is conferred on the private view because it immediately precedes the exhibition, then the value prohibited to the private view card is snatched from it because its purpose is to signify a presence that it precedes, rather than constitutes. As such, the attention-seeking invitation card is rendered invisible by its very visibility. Invisibility is written all over the invitation card because its raison d'être is a proxy form of visibility.
Unlike the private view, which it announces, the invitation card is cast out of the culture it heralds. Instead of gaining momentum - and the privilege that accrues to speed - the invitation card seems to lag behind rather than sprint ahead. Stuck, like an "entrance" sign that is fixed on the exterior of the building, in a permanent state of never arriving because it paves the way for everyone else. This paradoxical state is not a play of shadows; it follows a precise pattern. According to the dialectical logic of the extraction of value, the exhibition profits from the work of the invitation card not only by exploiting it (extracting the value from it), but also by alienating it: precluding the invitation card from partaking in the value that it produces.
So, the visibility of the invitation card protects the artwork and the gallery from seeking visibility itself. It is, in this respect, possible to regard the invitation card as the repressed and unguarded other of what is proper to art. That is to say, the indispensable preliminary act of art's signification is the signifying, or framing, of the artistic event which, in turn, renders itself insignificant and inevitably dispensable. This trajectory of decline is the signature of a certain kind of supplement. In this instance what is supplementary to art - what art requires but cannot incorporate without surrendering itself - is the unselfconscious form of address, namely, to invite.
The invitation card, in a sense, has to become dispensable because it makes the mistake of inviting or - even worse perhaps - of being inviting. Stamped with a miniature image taken from the exhibition, as the invitation card so often is, the dependence of the invitation card (and by virtue of this sign, the independence of the exhibition as a real and significant experience) is worn by the invitation card like a disgraceful uniform, while the exhibition itself pushes the invitation card into architectural insignificance (corridor, entrance, office, information desk, etc.).
What prevents the invitation card from enjoying the full cultural significance of the art exhibition? Having described, in part, the conditions under which the proxy significations of the invitation card decline to zero (get returned, as it were, to their proper place in the artwork), I want to consider the exchange under other conditions. Insofar as the invitation card is set up by the administration of the gallery as an insignificant substitute for the artwork and the exhibition display, the invitation card is a threat to the code of what is proper to the gallery and to art if it fails or refuses to return its temporary signification back to the gallery and the artworks it houses. In other words,
This is why the future of art belongs to the system of deployment and forms of address of the invitation card and the mechanisms, pleasures and powers that the invitation card engages in as art's proxy. The invitation is, if you prefer, an incitement.
Dave Beech
Lymm, UK
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