A Dramaturgy for Curating Process
For Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table, the structure of the exhibition as process-oriented and object-oriented is a parallel methodology that stages in real-time the working principles of Stein’s play and thus elucidates something about the play’s rather cryptic “meaning.” Yet, since there is no real “content” in Stein’s play, the task of “framing” is a particular challenge dramaturgically: the exhibition performs Stein’s play and is not about Stein’s play. An exhibition-as-rehearsal explores a kind of open-ended dramaturgy, a way of keeping “structure and content … dynamic and continually … in process, rather than as elements to be fixed and resolved.” (Behrndt and Turner, 30) In Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table, curatorial decisions are made in the performance-making process and as a condition of this process. Here, curatorial thinking is performative and object-oriented.
In Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table, exhibition is not a noun, it is a doing form made in and through its exhibit-ing; a process laid bare and an abstraction that is also the performance of the play. The rehearsal is also a technique.[16] To understand Stein’s play we must construct a methodology for thinking, writing, reading, and exhibiting that focuses on relations and the role that objects play in their arrangements. This exhibition is a laboratory where the text is to be explored and experimented with. This is not an engagement with Steinian poetics through citation. This is a rehearsal of her ideas about composition in exhibition form. Stein’s still life is a process. Its rehearsal (which is also its staging) is also a way to learn how to curate process more effectively.
[16] I use the word technique with reference to Erin Manning and Brian Massumi’s practice of “event conditioning.” They contend that collaborative modes of thinking are practices that move between techniques of relation. They discuss this idea through what they call “enabling constraints,” which is a method through which to facilitate a co-generation of effects. I liken this concept to the way in which Rehearsal for Objects Lie on A Table is conceived as a proposition toward a real-time exhibition making practice. See Thought in the Act, in particular pages 92-93.
