Eventhood is the horizon line in the spontaneous ideology of much art-historical discourse. Art historians have accustomed us to seeing art in terms of events: artworks, exhibitions, publications, movements... construing art as an irruptive event, penetrating stable appearance with novelty and all the attendant fireworks. But this is a strangely masculinist under- standing of art-historical process. To focus on the epiphany of ‘events’ – and to see art itself as event – rather than on fugitive occurrences, is to foreground particular moments when a set of material, social and imaginary ruptures come together and pro- duce a break in the flow of history. As Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson and Vassilis Tsianos have argued in Es- cape Routes – Control and Subversion in the Twenty-First Century (2008), an escapological perspective is inherently different: ‘An event is never in the present; it can only be designated as an event in retrospect or anticipated as a future possibility. To pin our hopes on events is a nominalist move which draws on the masculinist luxury of having the power both to name things and to wait about for salvation. Because events are never in the present, if we highlight their role in social change we do so at the expense of considering the potence of the present that is made of people’s everyday practices: the practices employed to navigate daily life and to sustain relations, the practices which are at the heart of social transformation long before we are able to name it as such.’ In our society of the event, the event itself disappears from view. It becomes the horizon line itself.
Eventhood, from Toward a Lexicon of Usership, Museum of Arte Util
