“The First Exhibition-Dialogue on Contemporary Art in Europe”, organised with the support of the Council of Europe, brought collections from eight European museums to Lisbon, from 28 March to 16 June 1985, during which time 49,010 visitors were recorded. The museums included in this joint exhibition were the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, Austria; the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent, Belgium; the Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen Preußische Kulturbesitz, Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany; the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy; the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands; the Sonja Henie-Niels Onstad Foundations, Oslo, Norway; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; and, finally, the Modern Art Centre of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal. The Tate Gallery, in London, United Kingdom; the Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris, France; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, in Umlebaeck, Denmark, and the Kunstmuseum, in Basel, Switzerland, were also invited to take part but did not accept the invitation.

According to René Berger, who was responsible for the initial development of the project that would lead to the “Exhibition-Dialogue”, it was the result of a first discussion held at the International Association of Art Critics Congress in 1978, in Switzerland. Two years later, in 1980, an exhibition using a model close to the one proposed for the Modern Art Centre was held in 1985, organised by Zurich’s Kunsthaus and Lausanne’s Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, under the title “Les Musées Suisses Collectionnent l'Art Actuel en Suisse”. René Berger, who was the director of the Lausanne museum from 1962 to 1981, had already organised three exhibitions there using a similar structure at the 1963, 1966 and 1970 Salons de Galeries-Pilotes, reflecting the first experiences in the practical and theoretical journey surrounding this exhibition model. In 1981, in a study seminar with the theme of Images de Notre Identité: Les Musées Européens vous proposent, organised by the Council of Europe and under R. Berger’s responsibility, took place in Delphi to discuss the proposal. This was of interest to representatives of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Greece and the process that would eventually lead to the holding of the exhibition began in 1982.

Following the maturing of the René Berger’s theoretical proposal, the exhibition-dialogue concept came from an attempt to form an “image of the art of our days” (Exposição-Diálogo sobre Arte Contemporânea na Europa, 1985, p. 25), without an immediate concern with building a local, national or global identity. The exhibition is essentially a meeting of museums – it was even proposed for them to be presented side-by-side and separately, which did not come to pass. What was proposed was a vertical model which would lead to a complex network of relationships provided by the objects. In other words, it was a model founded in the definition of a modern art system – an expression suggested by Berger for analysing the artistic milieu and the various agents that form it – with specific agents, such as artists, galleries, auction houses, art fairs and international meetings at biennials, museums, etc.

The exhibition would therefore operate as the result of that institutional structure, and the final set of works to be exhibited (and therefore the relationships established too) would always be subject to choices already made and dependent on the journey travelled by the pieces in that structure. In this system, it would be up to the museum to establish a discourse of continuity between contemporary art and the entire history of art, while at the same time acquiring and exhibiting works already in the institutional circuit thanks to their relevance as pieces that complete, complement or explain museological discourse. The museum was also considered to be free from any political or market restrictions. The exhibition-dialogue concept depended on mediation carried out by the various agents from the moment when the artwork was produced until the exhibition in question (Exposição-Diálogo sobre Arte a Contemporânea na Europa, 1985, p. 20).

However, the Council of Europe’s interest in René Berger’s theoretical reflects a second objective for the exhibition, as well as the attempt to provide an information instrument able to provide “a pluralist but above all legitimate image of contemporary creation” (ibidem, p. 26).

As Michael Marschal von Bieberstein mentions in the preface signed on behalf of the Council of Europe, the exhibition was particularly directed towards “examining the role played by museums in presenting contemporary art to the public with the goal of better understanding its contribution to both renewing our heritage and, as a result, to forming our identity” (ibidem, p. 12). René Berger concludes this intention by stating that “the idea [would] involve not being restricted to a preconceived or normative identity, nor trying to find a compromising definition, but rather using the exhibition-dialogue to sponsor the search for a pluralist, dynamic [European] identity” (ibidem, p. 24).

This theoretical proposal would therefore work as an attempt to break away from imposition of an aesthetic, historical, moral, economic, political or cultural discourse. It was presumed that representatives of each museum meeting would in itself help cancel out a single, directed, preconceived, normative and ideological discourse, based on the eight museums’ freedom to choose the works. Although this freedom of choice for each museum was available with regard to the works to be sent to Lisbon, space was left for works considered fundamental to complete a “pluralist image (...) of contemporary creation”, as René Berger says in the introduction to the Catalogue-Dossier. However, two criteria were adopted by the organising committee: all the works should have been acquired by the respective museums in the last fifteen years and acquisitions could not be made for the purpose of the exhibition. This freedom of choice would help create a neutral space by consciously stepping back from any pre-established direction with regard to the works to be exhibited. “Exhibition-dialogue” would, as a result, be a set of procedures aiming to form an apparently neutral space to allow for equality among counterparts, thereby boosting any possible external determinations that could shed light on or help the analyses proposed and, therefore, the possibility of establishing a dialogue among pieces, museums and the community. It is in this context that institutional representations of museums and the Catalogue-Dossier become particularly relevant as structural elements of the exhibition. The survey included in the catalogue contains a set of information regarding the budget, number of visitors, acquisition policies and focuses for the collections of each museum, among other things, seeking to meet the exhibition’s objectives by offering an instrument to provide more detailed comparison of a wide range of fields among the participating museums.

However, despite the attempt by W.A.L. Beeren to systematise the different artistic proposals in the catalogue, when alluding to the artworks – which include pieces by Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Richard Serra – he ended up shepherding them into a field somewhere between sociology and anthropology. Sociology, due to the social structure in which the works were inserted and because they were chosen as the result of the journey they made within that same structure; anthropology, because they were considered artefacts that could formulate an identity. The lack of an overall view of contemporary art, beyond bringing together already renowned works of art in the same space, is in fact a reason for one of the harshest reviews of the exhibition, published in the Neue Züricher Zeitung newspaper on 2 April 1985.

However, according to René Berger, only a meeting space created in such a format could provide a legitimate image of the art of our days, not just from the point of view of art objects, but placing museums and the territorial, cultural and identity realities that were intended to be depicted side by side, seeking in this case to address a European identity understood as being dynamic, inconstant, plural and manifold. A definition of identity, in the European case, that is opened to reflection on the interest shown by the Council of Europe in this exhibition model. In fact, by seeking to escape from the definition of a normative or preconceived identity – as defended by both René Berger and by Michael Bieberstein – the exhibition sought to state that pluralist, dynamic, inconstant and manifold identity. The “Exhibition-Dialogue”, as part of the Council of Europe’s cultural diplomacy for defining and solidifying a common European identity, involved precisely what would be called a political myth in action, which could be understood from the motto of the Council of Europe and the European Union: Unity in diversity (see European Cultural Convention [online]).

As Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand say: “political myth is not only a scientific hypothesis for building a world or an image contemplating that world. A political myth (...) is a determination to act” (Bottici; Challand, “Rethinking Political Myth”, European Journal of Social Theory, 2006). The same authors believe that politics play out more in a fight for populations’ imaginations than a legitimate use of physical coercion. This fight for the imaginary can also be found in “work on myth” (Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 1985), assuming that it is not a stable narrative but rather a continuous process that works on a narrative basis updated for each period and place. Chantal Mouffe also appears to move in this direction when defending the concept of political community as discourse and not as an empirical reference. She therefore believes that the very definition of political community, which we can broaden to the definition of a cultural identity, presupposes a collision between us and them.  She even says that “based on acts of exclusion, the conditions of possibility of the political community are at the same time the conditions of impossibility for its full materialisation”, and the latter is joined by a concern with what is public. It is therefore “a community without a defined form and under constant reconstruction” (Mouffe, Chantal, Citizenship and Political Identity in October, vol. 61, The Identity in Question, summer 1992, pp. 28-32).

She therefore responds to the need for a concrete meaning of a certain point in time and space, an idea made explicit by René Berger when defending that the role of modern art museums also involves “revealing the creation of the collective memory of our days”. Away from a prescriptive guideline on what a work of art is, in this context works are used by being placed within a discourse that deals with the type of reception, what it is like or how it can be regulated and how it contributes or may contribute to creating a vision of art or an identity. Therefore, the exhibition model appears to refract the political work of the Council of Europe, making it possible to establish parallels between them: they operate on a representative rationale; they seek to create a territory of cooperation and communication among institutions and/or various bodies; both aim to act on the subject, providing an instrument able to organise a discourse on contemporary art and seeking to form a common imaginary; both rely on a regulating agent as a guarantee of equality of circumstances within a given institutional structure. The concept of refracting is used based on Pierre Bourdieu, when he attempts to define the notion of field: “to speak of ‘field’ is to recall that (…) it is a veritable social universe (…) place of entirely specific struggles, notably concerning the question of knowing who is part of the universe (…). The important fact, for the interpretation of works, is that this autonomous social universe functions somewhat like a prism which refracts every external determination: demographic, economic or political events are always retranslated according to the specific logic of the field” (During, Simon, The Cultural Studies Reader, 2008, p. 90).

It is also based on these parallelisms that it is possible to justify the argument that the problems revealed at the outset of organising this exhibition, to which it attempted to respond, are solved under a similar organisation of life in common. The exhibition should therefore be framed by the moment of Portugal’s accession to the European Economic Community, in the context of democratisation of a liberal country. The result of reworking relationships between the Republic and Europe, which began to take place more intensively when Portugal became a member of the EFTA, this closeness would only be possible, nonetheless, in the post-revolutionary context. When, in September 1976, Portugal joined the Council of Europe – with whose support the “17th Exhibition of Art, Science and Culture” was organised in Lisbon in 1983 – a fundamental step was taken towards future accession to the European Economic Community, with Portugal’s accession treaty being signed on 12 June 1985, days before the exhibition closed.

The “Exhibition-Dialogue” formed based on discussion of that mode was not restricted to representations of the participating museums, however. Considering the objectives that the organising committee aimed to achieve, the exhibition was composed of five different features. Representations of the collections and their institutional presentation occupied exhibition spaces, forming the two first features discussed here. The Catalogue-Dossier included not only the range of works and artists exhibited but also an important set of information that helped meet the exhibition’s objectives with texts on each of the museums and the surveys they filled in. The colloquiums and round tables made it possible to further explore the topics under discussion, and four colloquiums or round tables were held as part of the “Exhibition-Dialogue”. On 30 March there was a public discussion with speeches scheduled by René Berger, José-Augusto França, José Luís Porfírio and Rui Mário Gonçalves; on 12 April, Wolff Vostel moderated a round table on the theme of Performance in Question; on 15 May, Fernando Azevedo moderated a round table on the theme of the Exhibition-Dialogue itself; and on 15 June a new round table was held, open only to professionals and moderated by René Berger, with the aim of making an overall assessment of the exhibition. Finally, ACARTE’s parallel programme, with its own catalogue, made it possible to overcome one of the shortcomings indicated by critics present at the exhibition opening: an incipient presence of artistic practices such as performance. The annual meeting of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM) of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) was held at the Modern Art Centre at the time of the official opening of the “Exhibition-Dialogue”. This was not a feature of the exhibition, but it would have been associated with one of the objectives that led the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to be interested in it, as a way of establishing the Modern Art Centre internationally.

The intensive programme that characterised the opening days was disseminated to the press by the Council of Europe on 4 March 1985. The exhibition opened to the press on 28 March, and participants in the CIMAM meeting also had accreditation. The official opening of the exhibition took place on 29 March, attended by President of the Republic General Ramalho Eanes, with speeches by José de Azeredo Perdigão, René Berger and Gaetano Adinolfi, representing the Council of Europe. A round table was also organised for that day, open to participants in the CIMAM meetings and other professionals, with moderation by René Berger. The CIMAM meeting took place on 28 and 29 March 1985, including a tour of the “Exhibition-Dialogue”. The “Exhibition-Dialogue” would open to the public only on 30 March 1985. The attendance of CIMAM members and the support from the Council of Europe help explain references to the exhibition in a wide range of international newspapers or magazines in the field. As an example, as well as articles in the press of member states of the Council of Europe, two articles were published in newspapers in former Yugoslavia, one in the Canada and a request for information was even received by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation from an exhibition assistant at the Biennale of Sydney.

It was mentioned by Alexandre Pomar in Revista, a supplement of the Expresso weekly newspaper, for the unique character of “the vastest set of recent works that could have ever been seen here”, emphasising the exceptional nature of the international representations. He said that despite “less justified presences” and some gaps, the exhibition would not have been possible without two fundamental conditions. Firstly, the opening of the Modern Art Centre in 1983 – also taking into its museological objective as an art centre – and the attempt to establish it in the international institutional landscape. Secondly, the financial capacity of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation itself, a reason that partly explains why the “First Exhibition-Dialogue” was also the only exhibition-dialogue held.