Curating in the Continuous Present: A Rehearsal For Gertrude Stein's Objects Lie on a Table

A Detective Story

Gertrude Stein loved a good detective story, and she wrote a great many. The Geographical History of America is full of them. Stein’s writing experiments were often meditations on genre and form and she discovered a dramaturgy inherent in their inter-connected operations. Dramaturgy, while borrowed from the discourse of theatre, was, in fact, to be understood as a generic code: genre and form can tell us a great deal about the nature of a composition and, this composition in turn, tells us how to interpret meaning. Genre and form are clues, too. Importantly, the dramaturgy of a particular form (theatrical or otherwise), as Stein has taught us, can be interrogated through one form’s performance in the genre of another. Understood in this way, curating is to me now what dramaturgy was to Stein then: a mode of arrangement that can extend beyond a disciplinary container that defines it as convention—such as in theatre or in the visual arts—to become itself a container for new forms of investigation, including new forms of arrangement. An investigator herself, Stein discovered that every theoretical exploration was indeed a kind of detective story, for instance, “a charting of the mind in its progress toward discovery.” (Steiner, 164) I wonder: what might happen when one applies the continuous present, a writing technique that Stein used as a mode of composition that approximated that of Modern painting (still lives and portraits and landscapes) to the making of an exhibition, which is also a staging of a play—one of Stein’s plays in fact. Dramaturgy is understood here as an operative concept: it is performative not interpretative. Now the clues are in the doing not the thing that is already done. Thus, it should come to no surprise that throughout this writing experiment, which is also a “position paper”—and doubly an “exhibition” investigating its own etymological origins, “to hold forth” as if as a form of evidence (Douglas, n.pag)—Stein’s play also becomes a clue interwoven into the investigation that we shall now set out to make, or perhaps more to the point, elucidate.

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