HAPPY IS TO SEE WHAT IT DOES!
From the beginning, this exhibition arose out of a shifting set of arrangements, which is not entirely surprising considering the play it is rehearsing. An arrangement, after all, is another way of making future plans. So, even if we “begin” with Stein and her 1922 play Objects Lie on a Table, in many ways the “arranging” we undertake in this exhibition continues throughout its duration. What began with a selection of pre-existing works has resulted in an exhibition composed almost entirely of new works, soon-to-be “re-arranged” works, and about-to-happen works. In part, these changes are the culmination of the artists’ idiosyncratic engagement with Stein’s text. Naturally, each artist was interested or inspired, intrigued or perplexed in or by a different aspect of Objects Lie on a Table: be that an actual object mentioned in the original text; or a particular writing technique of Stein’s; or the way in which Stein explored form through its performance in another genre (a still life in a play); or even, simply, by one of the writer’s enigmatic and maddening turns of phrase. In other instances, works in the exhibition—especially those that directly reference “still lives” — innovate approaches to arrangement that re-frame relations between subjects and objects. They thus gesture toward our contemporary composition or “time-sense,” as Stein would call it. Through this process of re-ordering, re-arranging, and re-staging, that is, continually rehearsing the play, the exhibition has become the play in the form of a series of art works that interrogate the play’s conventions in a similar fashion (one presumes) that Stein’s play interrogated those of Cézanne’s still lives. The exhibition, like Stein’s play, does the form; its meaning is composed in the act of arrangement.
In this sense, the process of making this exhibition has been as much an investigation of the play as the exhibition itself is a dramaturgical framework for the play’s “performance” at an art gallery. And this investigation does not end just because the show has opened—this is an exhibition made in the continuous present. All the artists were involved in the arrangement of the exhibition (i.e., its floor plan)—which was a dialogue around the play and its operative principles, and which began almost immediately after we embarked on this genre-bending experiment. Enacting the principles of the play in our process of arranging the exhibition, this “background” activity is as much a part of rehearsing the play as the concept of a shifting, or modular, exhibition design is a foregrounding of the “dynamic” nature of Stein’s still life.
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