An improvised display area, rigged up from diverse bits of furniture covered in sheets. The things on display, an odd assembly of rejected works and test pieces donated by artists who no longer want them - kitsch little sculptures and 'bad' paintings mostly, purposefully ugly and indicative of a prevailing DIY aesthetic. The sad history of these works, the ghost-like quality of the sheets draped over tables and chairs, the basement gallery and the dim lighting came together to produce a brooding atmosphere, and a work that was spooky and melancholic. In hindsight I can see that this piece (made with the artist Matthew Leahy at Cubitt Gallery in 1999) was the prototype for what Goshka Macuga has since expanded into an oeuvre. Several elements already were in place which have become hallmarks of her practice: the improvised sense of community represented by this 'snapshot' of the scene; an interest in marginalia; the idea of the museum display; curatorial work; collaboration as a methodology; and the production of strongly immersive environments.

Museums by artists are nothing new, and it is unsurprising that those who have conventionally relied on museum structures to provide a frame, an interface with the public and a depository for the future should turn their critical attention to it and seek to claim ownership in both conceptual and material terms. Perhaps the most frequently cited of these (besides Marcel Duchamp's) is Marcel Broodthaers's Musée d'Art Moderne, Département de Aigles, Section XIXième Siècle, which, according to his longtime collaborator Jürgen Harten, was an attempt to produce a different kind of public space. Coming out of his participation in the 1968 Cultural Revolution debates at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, it reflected the call by artists for 'new independent and open cultural structures'.¹ Needless to say, Broodthaers's idea of public space was highly aesthetic; insisting on a certain autonomy for art, it painstakingly mimicked the conventions that it sought to question. His museum was given 'authenticity' through its precise use of signage, its publicity material, invitation cards, visitor registration, elaborate sections and division, documentation, its museum director/ curator (Broodthaers himself) - and importantly through its intersection with official institutions such as the Louvre, the British Museum and The Royal Collection in Brussels, all of which were approached for loans.

Decades later, and after the rise of institutional critique, Macuga's relationship to curatorial practice is less a deconstructive one and more similar to an adventure in the synthetic world of the exhibition as an environment, in which the show provides the locus for certain collective processes. She makes her installations using diverse material from different sources, such as documents taken from archives, objects made according to existing prototypes or works obtained through collaborations with artists. Her style is ambitious, with these elements becoming subject to new interpretations and a repositioning which only the bravest curator would attempt. Some of her solutions for displaying material bring to mind the Italian/Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, a polymath who, in addition to buildings, designed clothes, furniture, theatre sets and costumes, edited a magazine, ran a cultural centre and organised exhibitions of great imaginative scope. Bo Bardi's training in Modernist aesthetics, along with a stated background in the communist movement, oriented her towards function and the social world, while the experience of living in Brazil added the qualities of fluidity, playfulness, ecology, humour, aesthetic impurity, inventiveness and a love of unusual objectsfrom various cultures. Her exhibition designs ranged from a display at the Museum of Art in São Paulo where paintings were hung on glass panels supported by concrete blocks, to an exhibition of indigenous artefacts shown on a gallery floor covered with leaves.

To enter a Bo Bardi installation would have been to move within a mise-en-scène where the environment was part of the experience, and similarly with Macuga the notion of the gallery space as a forgotten backdrop is complicated by the demands placed on the viewer. In Sleep of Ulro (2006), a work partly based on set designs from Robert Wiene's 1919 film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, an elaborate architectural structure was installed in a disused warehouse. ² Used as both a framing device and viewing situation for diverse objects, artworks and performances relating to the supernatural, the architectural element of the exhibition was a piece in its own right. A striking composition of steps, walkways, platforms, dramatically raked walls, podiums and a cylindrical tower supported on a scaffolding rig, it had the character of a multi-dimensional theatre within which the viewer was presented with diverse opportunities for seeing and being seen. It is hard to think of an equivalent work, but perhaps Martin Kippenberger's The Happy End of Franz Kafka's 'Amerika' (1994), based on the final scene from Kafka's Amerika, originally published in 1927, in which the surreal Nature Theater of Oklahoma sets up a recruitment centre in a abandoned racecourse) is one - for its grandiose dimensions, its invocation of a vast public space, and for the diverse ways (in theory) that the viewer can enter and interact with it. More than just a theatre, Kafka's invention is a curious mixture of the American dream and a benevolent communist state agency offering everyone employment regardless of their previous history. The installation consists of an endless configuration of old furniture where the interviews can take place, as well as artworks by other artists, set up on a field of AstroTurf. A postscript to the novel adds that through working at the theatre the hero's dreams would come true, and this redemptive note is reflected in Kippenberger's piece, literally, in the sense that all of the cast-offs and detritus which make up the work find a second life and a new significance in their redeployment as art.

Bringing together disparate ideologies, Friendship of the Peoples(2001) was a large sculptural work by Macuga produced in collaboration with the artist Declan Clarke.³ It took its name from the spectacular Friendship of the Peoples fountain in Moscow, designed to celebrate the sixteen Republics of the Soviet Union and featuring heroic statues of women wearing regional costumes and surrounding a giant sheaf of corn. Friendship of the Peoples was also a functioning fountain, although virtually made by hand, and failing to present the same aesthetic and ideological coherence as the original. A proto-monument cobbled together from several elements, it including a stage-like structure based on designs by Rudolf Steiner, a water fountain that moved through a series of concrete 'flow forms' and a large pond fringed with slate and punctuated with pieces of drift wood. Suspended above this arrangement like stars in the night sky, a series of spherical lamps hung in the shape of the big dipper, each one with a red letter painted on it; together they spelled out Malcolm X's name, reflected in the blackness of the water. An idiosyncratic and ambiguously positioned work, Friendship of the Peoples has something to say about the impossibility of universal gestures in the face of fragmented and conflicting ideologies, or perhaps it proposed to reconcile them with an aesthetic solution. For me it pointed towards the way that the public domain is created through designed objects and structures which not only produce meaning through the ideologies encoded within them, but also provide points of commonality, grounded in their shared use. As Hannah Arendt states, the world is the 'fabrication of human hands' and the things in it can be utilised to organise, unite and separate people. ⁴ She takes the simple metaphor of a table around which a group of people are seated. This table produces a common space, while at the same time preventing the people from encountering each other in a vacuum. To take this metaphor at face value and further its implications, you could add that artists, designers, architects and engineers have always been directly implicated in the production of a common space; something which was a central tenet of Modernism, and a skill put to use by democratic governments as well as totalitarian regimes. Somewhere this is parodied by Kippenberger in his endless arrangement of tables and chairs, and invoked in Friendship of the Peoples as an absurdity - but lovingly so as not to do away with it entirely.

Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International by V.I. Lenin Zürich 1916/Cabaret Voltaire Zürich 1916 (2005) was the elaborately titled performance made by Macuga in collaboration with the artist Spartacus (then Lali) Chetwynd for the group exhibition 'Communism' that I curated in Project Arts Centre, Dublin. The invitation to the artists was to investigate the term 'communism' not historically, but rather by identifying and locating it in the present. However, the point of departure for Chetwynd and Macuga was Zürich in 1916, the moment when by coincidence Lenin lived on the same street as the Cabaret Voltaire. It is tempting to imagine Vladimir Lenin, sitting at his desk to write a polemic about the nature of capitalism and imperialism, while being disturbed by the sound of Dada manifestoes and absurd poetry coming from down the street. Chetwynd and Macuga chose to reconstruct this proximity as a sort of pantomime in which a man playing Lenin read his treatise aloud on one side of a curtain, while a troupe of figures in bizarre costumes acted out a Dada performance on the other. The actor was a hired professional, but the troupe performing the Cabaret Voltaire were enlisted from a circle of colleagues and friends, chosen for their different physiologies and personality types, with a gallerist, various artists and staff members from the art centre (including the director) each improvising actions based on a blueprint set by Macuga and Chetwynd. The costumes, made from cheap materials such as paper, sack, cloth, paint and string, were designed for the players in order to elicit different characters - a straw man, an angel, a bird, a priest and a constantly vibrating mound of coiled paper. Asked about this work, Macuga spoke of an avant-garde - both political and artistic - that, briefly occupying the same time and space, had subsequently taken radically divergent paths. But this performance did not propose a dialectic in which the two are reunited, nor did it create an identification of the kind described by Walter Benjamin, in which today's radicalism appropriates the past, much in the way that fashion plunders yesterday's look and brings it convincingly into the present. It was not a polemical work, but rather the raucous production of something like a community play, where the frisson of recognition and the experience of self-presentation are augmented by points of reference, which gave it an emancipatory coding and a radical edge. Its combination of amateurism and high spectacle was reminiscent of the scene described by Kafka in Amerika, at the entrance to the racecourse where 'a long, low platform had been set up, on which hundreds of women dressed as angels in white robes with great wings on their shoulders were blowing on long trumpets that glittered like gold'. They looked gigantic, 'except that the smallness of their heads spoiled a little the impression of size and their loose hair looked too short and almost absurd hanging between the great wings and framing their faces'.⁵

While not part of a clearly defined methodology, Macuga utilises the principle of friendship repeatedly in her practice, featuring artist networks in her installations and performances and entering collaborations established on connections and identifications that go beyond professional categories. You could extend this element of friendship to the material itself, which although it is often selected through some given contingency (the collection of a host institution, facts about the building where the exhibition takes place or a curatorial theme), is interpolated into strikingly personal and affirmative statements. Friendship has its gradations and different functions, ranging from an organising principle brought into play for its usefulness to a source of mutual pleasure. The effects of friendship are equally diverse and unpredictable because the logic which applies to human transactions based on economic exchange or the transmission of information is complicated by a set of other dynamics which are difficult to pin down - 'what friendship is and what hospitality is, exceeds, precisely, knowledge'. ⁶

We do things with and for our friends which cannot always be rationalised. Applied as a principle to a curatorial setting, the groundless quality of friendship goes against the grain of museum practice, which traditionally allocates roles according to professional categories and arranges objects according to strict historical genealogies rather than affinities. Allowing for a more fluid set of coordinates, Macuga's projects often blur these boundaries. For example, during the production of Friendship of the Peoples, I accepted the invitation to conceive and make the sculpture alongside Macuga and Clarke, becoming a third member of the team; the work itself juxtaposed disparate architectural elements, bringing them into a new and unexpected relation. Acknowledging this subjective dimension in her work is not to detract from the precision of Macuga's installations. They come about through immense effort, with the artist often acting like a benign dictator, meticulously organising material in accordance to a given set of criteria. These change according to the context but include setting out the formal language that connects objects to one another across different time periods, pinpointing historical or anecdotal information relating to a particular site, and utilising the artist's personal relationship with people both inside and outside of the art world to determine the choice of collaborative partners who will participate in each project. Overall, the installations are held together with a tightly structured display, which instead of acting as a constraint functions like a striation in the work, and a template within which the processes of friendship can become operational.

In the recent work When Was Modernism? (2007), a tree surrounded by stone benches was installed in a circular room lined with shelves on which a number of artworks had been placed. ⁷ The elements of the sculpture and its installation represented both an inside and an outside space - the leafy campus of the art school at Santiniketan in West Bengal, and the student workshops with their shelves holding small-scale sculptures modelled in clay, wood, concrete, metal and stone. It also invoked the spirit of the institution and its history. The tree with its circular arrangement of benches is a central motif for Santiniketan, an institution founded on the idea of nature as teacher, and the sculptures on the shelves, which were made by students at the college, suggested a vocabulary of Modernist forms. Hidden amongst the student works were small pieces by the mid-twentieth-century Modernist master Ramkinkar Baij, who was a teacher at the school. I was reminded of a photograph of Macuga as a student at the Liceum of Art in Poland in the early 1980s, sitting before a plinth on which a sculpture much like the ones made by the artist was taking shape. This repetition of forms is not an accident but rather the result of a shared archive. The school at Santiniketan, established by Rabindranath Tagore in 1919 - the same year as the Bauhaus - was a cosmopolitan place with artists and teachers coming from India, Europe and Southeast Asia to a rural setting, where a Modernist aesthetic was given a distinctly Indian inflection and a vaguely utopian ideology. Perhaps it would be possible to trace the connection between the sculptures on the shelves and Macuga's in the photograph through the analysis of art-historical genealogies via the Bauhaus or along some other route, but it seems unnecessary because the installation itself did this in the form of a gestalt. Sweeping aside questions of cultural difference and permission, it demonstrated the artist's affinity with these works and gave them recognition in both senses of the world - by acknowledging them as familiar as well as worthy of this elaborate restaging.

When was Modernism? The question posed by the title of the installation reflects an uncertainty about how the past is understood by the present. Macuga's work handles this issue differently from the work of many artists today, for whom this uncertainty is often manifested only by a nostalgia for past radicalism or style genres. Friendship of the Peoples erected the past as a series of conflicting structures, which we continue to negotiate and inhabit. Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International by V.I. Lenin Zürich 1916/Cabaret Voltaire Zürich 1916 staged the past but exploded its original meaning in a riotous performance. When Was Modernism? treated it with a respect tinged with melancholy - that is testament to a curious relay, in which the works lined up on the shelves appeared to be the relics of an aesthetic language containing a promise for the future that has since become historical.

— Grant Watson