MIHNEA MIRCAN - A SUM OF CORRECTIONS

A Sum of Corrections looks at the discipline of art history as an epistemological model reinforcing constructed symmetries and hegemonic exclusions, as an unstable, permanently renegotiated archive. In often explicit opposition to older incarnations of art history discourse, the different strands of the new art history explore the interdependence of critical biases and ideological missions, trying to re-establish a sense of historical course or destination after the putative halt of history, and to reconcile its complicated, messianic legacy with a partial, theoretical evacuation of historicism. This engenders series of prologues, antecedent to several histories that would dispense with chronologic confabulation or mutations of style, non-histories saturated by methodological self-consciousness, aware of – and to some extent, incapacitated by – their alternatives and their own inability to contain and reflect a multiplicity of subject-positions, to diffract across plural and unregulated claims of interpretive authority. If we are indeed today traversing the corridors of a museum of art history, where the rhetorical apparatus, brilliant intuitions, fallacies, obsolescence and – as Mircan would agree – inevitability of the discipline are put on display, its strategies for naturalising or making heterodox (much in the same way that the Museum appears in a standard institutional critique scenario), how can this institution be engaged? Taking a cue from works, more or less recent, whose main operation seems to be an institutional critique of the institution of art history, A Sum of Corrections looks at the exhibition as a site where contemporary art manifests its chronic historiographic compulsion, but also – significantly – as a mode of imagining and fabricating a historical future.

Mihnea Mircan is a curator based in Bucharest, Romania. His recent projects include Since we last spoke about monuments, at Stroom Den Haag, History of Art, the, at the David Roberts Art Foundation in London, and the publication A wooden bicycle against a background of masterpieces, co-edited with Alon Levin at Kunstverein Hamburg. As from 2011 he will be the new director of Extra City, Antwerp.

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