Bruce Hainley and Shahryar Nashat Short-Circuit the Exhibition Economy

At lunch in Los Angeles one day last year, Shahryar Nashat and Bruce Hainley spotted actor Robert Pattinson at a nearby table and captured a blurry creepshot. He’s dishevelled, mid-chew, hiding under a baseball cap and sunglasses.

It must’ve been a lightning bolt to see Pattinson in the flesh, like experiencing the Mona Lisa (1503) in person. Most of us only encounter such celebrity via mediation: reproductions, movies, merchandise. Nashat and Hainley leapt into that circus, converted a person into a flat replica and circulated the token like a cheap coin. Pattinson is, they told me when we spoke in May, the ‘muse’ for their untitled exhibition at The Renaissance Society. Pattinson catapulted to fame playing a vampire in Twilight (2008); like the mythical bite, there’s violence to that transfiguration: muse is to artist as prey is to vampire.

What does it feel like to participate in this economy of images? Inside the exhibition space, a lofted three-headed monitor played aloud a clip from The Phil Donahue Show (1967–96), converting a teen’s recounting of trauma into readymade (Larry Clark, Brian, 15 year old raped by mop handle, 1992). I ducked beneath a rough-cut door and found myself inside a kind of makeshift attic, watching a black-and-white livestream of a sleeping man (username: Sleeping Pig), feeling like some kind of creep. By far the most uncomfortable experience – which is saying a lot – was viewing Marie Laurencin’s Head of a Young Woman (1926) while pole dancers from Chicago’s Fly Club performed behind me; it was impossible to ignore the duet of Clark’s soundtrack with that of block stilettos slamming against the platform, the squeal of flesh swiveling around metal. It felt violent to turn my back.

Pattinson, you could argue, is no victim: he made his bed, traded privacy for fame. Sleeping Pig’s livestream bed, too, was monetized – users could pay a sum to wake him – and the dancer was compensated for her time. Laurencin, on the other hand, long deceased, could not consent to her display. The painting, acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986, had never been shown. Then again, I understood why; I preferred the dancer. Whom did I owe more?

This kind of cogitating is only a little bit masturbatory. The competition for attention is, in aggregate, zero sum: a spotlight only works because everything else is cast into shadow, and everybody jostles for their small space in that light. It’s the trade-off we’ve chosen: a larger quantity of mediated experience over a narrower sliver of real life.

This equation has a particular character in the artworld, which prizes in-person communion at the same time that its machinery depends on mediation: installation shots, Instagram promotion, editorial coverage. Hainley and Nashat’s critique works by inhabiting the form of the exhibition to expose its cracks. By including works that wouldn’t normally be considered art – livestreams, pole dancers – the exhibition plays with elevating them into art, while at the same time razing the works of art on view to the level of image-commodity.  Its construction short-circuits the typical economy of exhibitions: there’s no title, no press release until the exhibition closes, and no names of artists were divulged in advance. At the same time, they lean into the truths of the market for coverage, teasing the show with the hype and hush of a sneaker drop, while plucking the behind-the-scenes strings of editorial relationships.

This show induces an embodied, skin-prickling discomfort that you, the reader, will probably not experience. In writing this review, I’m ushering it, like the vampiric bite, into its afterlife as a mediated relic ­– a creepshot of Robert Pattinson, a selfie with the Mona Lisa – petrified eternally like so much cold and sparkling flesh: an act of violence, an act of love.

The untitled exhibition curated by Bruce Hainley and Shahryar Nashat is on view at The Renaissance Society, Chicago, until 2 July. 

^{Main image: untitled exhibition, 2023, installation view. Courtesy: the artists and The Renaissance Society, Chicago; photograph: Robert Chase Heishman}