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• 1 2016-02-21T16:10:02-08:00 “Objects on a table and the explanation.” (Stein, Objects, 105) 11 plain 2016-03-24T10:11:08-07:00 Channeling Stein: Gertrude Stein talks a lot about composition. The composition explains a lot and so explaining a lot we learn about the composition we are part of the composition that we make and it is hard to see the composition when we are in it making it. Being in it making it feels different than looking at it from the future or from its beginning.
   
  Concerned with the happening as it is happening and less so with categories and reflection, Stein saw processes as either “of” or “in” composition. The “of” marks a particular time-sense related to one’s time period and the “in” marks the ways in which a composition is arranged as a set of real-time events taking place. The exhibition, Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table dramatizes the connections between “in” and “of,” among other relations, as we shall see.[1]
   
  But, compositions are not simply arranged in order to make meaning legible, especially in what I am calling performative curating—a methodology that uses the continuous present as a dramaturgical approach to exhibition making. Here, meaning emerges through the ways in which arrangements make compositions and relations, and, in fact, other objects.  To curate in the continuous present is to keep arrangement alive: compositions are instantiated through acts of arrangement as a condition of their own making. Making sense by making itself, composition is meaning in arrangement. And, importantly for exhibition making in the present tense, one that questions its own gestalt.
  
   

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  [1] As Stein sees it, artists make compositions that are often not understood by their contemporaries because they are not making work about the present, but in the present. Stein believes this is why artists are often appreciated only after their time has passed, when the thinking has caught up to the propositions made in the artists’ work. She states in her lecture Plays: “the business of art is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to completely express that actual present.” (251)
  
  And an example from RIGHT NOW:
  Portraits & Repetition is a new film by Berlin-based artist Juliette Blightman commissioned by the South London Gallery, presented as a continuous online screening for one year on a purpose built online screening platform.
  
• 1 2016-02-27T10:17:59-08:00 Erika DeFreitas, A Teleplasmic Study with Doilies (Angie No.1), 2010 - 2011 6 plain 2016-02-27T10:42:32-08:00 Erika DeFreitas, A Teleplasmic Study with Doilies (Angie No.1), 2010 - 2011, a triptych of chromogenic prints. Feminist Art Collection, Toronto
  
  In Erika DeFreitas’s A Teleplasmic Study with Doilies (2010-11), we see the artist sensuously engaging with her grandmother’s doilies. As if transmitting her ancestor’s spiritual energy, these hand-crocheted doilies appear to ooze out of her mouth and take on a life of their own haunting, conjuring Dr. T. G. Hamilton’s ectoplasm photographs (taken during the séances conducted in his home in Winnipeg in the early 1900s). Here the body is a medium for channeling the material manifestations of the spirit world and their felt presence. But while the processes of possession—of being possessed—are frozen in the photographic portrait, the serial nature of the works and their repetition, side-by-side, in the installation bring to life the transitional and transformative experience of the channelings effect. Repetition is rhythmic and the bright coloured doilies, set against a black background, livelily dance across the images. Rhythm and repetition are also beloved devices for Stein. Repeated words came alive on the page as movement expressions whose meter marked a minimal modality of difference though what she called “insistence” (Stein, Portraits and Repetition, 167)—a change in emphasis.
  
  Stein’s portraits, which were the basis for her plays, captured the rhythm of a persons personality not as an image of their likeness but rather what was "of' their whole being: 
  

  “How often do we see what we have not readily recognized. I readily recognize the object that has the most perfect quality of imitation.” (Stein, Objects, 110)

  
  What is seen in DeFreitas’ portraits are energy effects. Taking on a life of their own, objects and words and people create a melody in movement that pictures the present moment as it occassions. Rhythm is a material:

  “Come up out of there is very well said when the instinct which has led to the introduction of words and music not pictures and music, not pictures and words not pictures and music and words, not pictures not music not words when the instinct which has lead to the spread of rubbing has been shed …” (Stein, Objects, 107)

  
  Stein was very interested in making a play the essence of what happened, without telling stories. (See Plays) Here we see the essence of an event that elides description: an exact resemblance to exact resemblance.
  
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