IAS Turbulence: Anselm Franke on 'Turbulence in the Museum'

by Anselm Franke. Responses by Larne Abse Gogarty (Slade, UCL) and Ayesha Hameed (Goldsmiths) In this talk, Anselm Franke presented some of his recent work on the exhibition and its theory-cum-practice. Against the backdrop of the recent “Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present ca. 1930” (HKW, 2018, co-curated with Tom Holert), he discussed the notion of the “S/O Function” or “subobjective function” used by critique Carl Einstein in his (mostly unpublished) work of the 1930. Einstein used the concept of “function” as a materialist, a-causal formula descriptive of the crisis-ridden remaking of subject and object alike in the hallucinatory encounter with art. What is the potential of this formula to rethink the relation between positivist reification and experiential turbulence within exhibitions? Of seizure and animation in objects and beholder alike?