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

Exploring Positions in Compositions

In one way or another, all the artists’ practices in Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table explore composition in more than formal terms. Like Stein, they expose the politics of arrangement, viewing it as a “ground” that can condition ways of thinking beyond simply supporting already established figures of thought. That is, the artists rearrange— acknowledging that the kinds of arrangements we make, especially with objects, can dramatically alter their status. Take Borsato’s museum action/intervention Tea Service (Conservators will wash the dishes), 2013, presented here as photographic documentation.

Restoring some of the oldest cups in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Grange House Collection back to their intended use, Borsato orchestrated a tea service with invited guests, including the conservators, who washed the dishes before and after this extraordinary event.

But even though there are works that make reference to actual objects in the play (such as a tea cup), works in this exhibition are not intended to be illustrative: this text, like the exhibition itself, is merely a “system to pointing” (Tender Buttons,) not a system of pointing. Rehearsals allow us to explore the range of pointing but not of pinpointing the position of meaning: neither in the exhibition, nor the play.

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