And afterwards. Now that is all. (Stein, Composition, 6)
It requires our movement as contributors to its gradual materialization. We move with and are moved by its shifting compositional arrangement, and we are, in fact, part of the composition by coming and going, entering and leaving the gallery that frames it. And the arrangement changes without us, too. We return and things have changed, been rearranged, added to, and subtracted from: always equal to its occasion-ing. Repetition is a condition of the exhibition’s adaptable form—but always a repetition with a difference. It is in the intra-actions of objects, space, and people that this exhibition can veer off into different, unpredictable directions that we, neither curator, nor artist, nor viewer, can anticipate or know in advance: our knowing is in the arrangement. It is through this relational dynamic and the “allure” of the objects that comprise it that the final form of the exhibition—its composition—becomes a material record of its rehearsal and its explanation: a still life made in 2016, the composition for Gertrude Stein’s 1922 Objects Lie on a Table, and a new kind of arrangement for curating.
And afterwards. Now that is all. (Stein, Composition, 6)
WORKS CITED