Statement: the State as a Masterpiece

“The State as a Work of Art” [Der Staat als Kunstwerk] is the opening chapter of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt’s 1860 book that established the history of culture as a distinct academic tradition. For the Swiss historian, claiming that the Italian states of the Renaissance were works of art meant asserting that they had been conceived as “conscious creations”: “daughters of reflection, based on visible foundations.” It is rare for the intersection of aesthetics and state theory to trace its roots to this point in history, although art criticism could benefit greatly from such an exploration.

True, the concept of the work of art has evolved significantly since Burckhardt’s post-Romanticism, and the difference becomes immeasurable when the comparison shifts back to the 15th century. Yet Statement, the exhibition Francisco Medail presents this year at Rolf Art Gallery in Buenos Aires, anchored in a reference to the present, could sustain the premise that Burckhardt used to open his seminal book.

Indeed, the “State” (or Estado) is already present in the very first letters of the exhibition’s title. When asked, Medail denies that this was a deliberate choice. Yet the signifier always reigns supreme. The selection of this noun reveals an underlying agenda: the intention to position the exhibition within a bipolar tension, with the private sphere at one pole and the State at the other. What Statement does explicitly reference, however, is the type of artist text known by that name: a form of writing in which visual artists are compelled to distill the essence of their work into a concise format. Statement is also a declaration—an assertion of values. The exhibition’s title, and the series it unfolds, names at least two distinct things: an identity strategy and a declaration (of principles, perhaps?); the rules of an autobiographical genre—with its conventional constraints and productive forces—and what might be called a program, in both the political and artistic sense of the term.

Statement consists of large-format photographs belonging to the exhibition view genre: images of photographic exhibitions curated by Medail during his previous tenure at the Centro Cultural Kirchner, a National State institution where he still works as a specialized curator. Transforming these documents into artworks, revoking their function as mere records, and transfiguring them into aesthetic artifacts with intrinsic value is the alchemy that commands the viewer’s attention and demands to be grasped in its full scope.

For over a decade, appropriation has been Medail’s primary aesthetic operation, and this exhibition undoubtedly engages deeply with that category. Appropriation here is not only exercised in relation to the exhibition views—which were not captured by Medail—but also, fundamentally, in relation to the exhibitions themselves. Through this mechanism, the exhibitions are transformed in status and become, in their own right, works of art: products of an aesthetic conception of the State, manifestations of the State-as-a-work-of-art.

Before appropriation became a standard practice in contemporary art, Michel Foucault identified it as one of the four characteristics that define the author-function. The French thinker argued that the notion of ownership over a work historically arose from criminal liability. Medail’s work magnifies the question of authorial ownership in a field where diverse social roles and representations make it uniquely fraught.

Using the exhibition view as a resource, Statement positions curation as a work of art. However, this categorical reallocation would lack depth without a second operation of displacement. According to a well-known theoretical tradition, the curator is seen as the figure who administers the public sphere. In Medail’s experience, this takes on heightened significance—a hyperbolic literalness. All the curatorial projects transmuted into artworks in the Rolf Art gallery were staged in strictly public spaces, within a cultural center under the National Executive Power, during an administration in which cultural resources differed radically from the current situation. Curation, as part of the public domain, finds its legibility as artwork in the retrospective consciousness of an ironic stance now located within the private sphere.

On the level of the images, the frontal framing of exhibition spaces highlights the intervals—the spaces between—that separate the various pieces included in each display. The images emphasize that the work is not defined by the visuals themselves but by the sensitive medium in which they are inscribed. It is the space between them, something akin to what Jacques Rancière has called the sensorium, that constitutes the work. Each photograph Medail exhibits emerges as the consciousness of an interstitial space.

From a compositional perspective, the dominant technique is mise en abyme. The images on display are windows into perspectival spaces, themselves punctuated by other windows—frames outlined with audible precision. Despite the emphasis on the photographic nature of these visual artifacts, one can evoke historical scenes from painting as potential intertexts. Specifically, I refer to depictions of galleries filled with paintings in the Baroque period. These works, in which walls vanish beneath an array of framed canvases—a tradition meticulously studied by Victor Stoichita—underscore the segmented nature of walls covered in transportable rectangles. Medail’s work reflects on the relationships between photography and two-dimensionality. It also comments on the connections between photography and the easel painting as a device historically tied to visibility.

More immediately, Medail’s production recalls the postmodern tradition of citationist painting, where the embedding of images within the visual space was commonplace. These two moments, despite the centuries separating them, are not entirely independent: the characterization of postmodernism as a neo-Baroque aligns well with this painterly style.

Beyond the constructive aspects of the image and its layered intertextuality, Medail’s series problematizes the biographical space. At its core lies the unbroken continuity of a life, understood as a real unity subjected by various practices to conflicts of interest and tensions over where and how its actions are inscribed. Medail’s life, split between a State role involving curatorial responsibility and a private commercial realm hosting his artistic production, forms the divided experiential space that this work ultimately explores. By doing so, it foregrounds—once again—the operation conceptualism inherited from the Romantic tradition: the transformation of the artist’s life, in its own right, into a work of art.