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

How to Write (in and of time)

For Stein, writing was an exploration of different time-senses [6] of composition and the strategies she consequently used as techniques of arrangement: in, similarity, difference, equilibration, distribution, continuous present, beginning again and again, lists, series, etc. are “of” her time, even if they were “in” her time as she was writing them into the present in order to mark the Modern period as distinct from the past. According to Stein, our approaches to composition and arrangement reflect how we live (they are dramaturgies, in fact): they are in and of the moment of our contemporaneity. My exhibition is an attempt to find out the question of our current composition by creating a situation for which the opening of an exhibition is not the end of a curatorial thought process but rather its beginning investigation.[7] Beginnings though are problematic, especially in the continuous present of an exhibition that makes itself by making itself. Beginnings can be considered a matter of aesthetic cause.[8] Or, for Stein, a beginning is a formal effect of writing: “sentences are contained within themselves and anything really contained within itself has no beginning, middle, or ending, any one can know this thing by knowing anything at any moment of their living.” (Stein, Narration, 20) Thus with no beginning, this exhibition approaches its meaning making through the live act of arrangement, probing in the process which kinds of exhibitions are relevant to our contemporary way of thinking and which kinds of curatorial practices constitute ways of thinking new arrangements. This has bearing on a number of approaches to objects, lying on tables or out there in the world—questions that Stein herself was asking then and those we are asking now. It turns out that linearity is not so much a quality of time as it is a lived experience in time. Time, then, is integral to the experience of exhibition making in the present tense and, in this context, curating, as a process, is a performative proposition into the time-sense of contemporary art and the modes of its presentation. It is neither a way to represent an idea, as in a reflection, nor is this exhibition a means of interpretation. Neither is it a representation of the play nor an illustration of a theme through chosen artists’ works.[9]  
[6] Time-sense could be thought of in a number of ways, such as the way time is felt, the way time is arranged through composition (especially real-time compositional practices), and of course the various approaches Stein used to keep time in the present through techniques in writing (such as the continuous present). Time-sense could also relate to a plot (a narrative that evolves over time or something that is happening simultaneously), etc. Or it could be a composition composed of elements from different time periods, creating a layered sense of time. Time-sense in this essay is seen in relation to composition but encompasses all of these aspects.
[7] We only need to look at platforms such as Flickr, Tumblr, Instagram, SCALAR, etc. to understand how these modes of presentation are dramaturgical. They give rise to the types of arrangements being made today. As assemblages of images, ideas, videos—found, linked, and created on-line, they are curatorial acts of meaning making. How they are used to innovate other compositional arrangements and make us think differently is something we have yet to fully understand since we are living in this moment and cannot analyse it from a distance. Using these platforms, or the strategies and techniques they offer, is one way of understanding how we might think, arrange, compose, do research, write, etc. differently through them. How we consume information will create new forms of dissemination and vice-versa: one cannot change an outcome without changing a process. New forms of research, presentation, and ideation will emerge out of these platforms. As dramaturgies of information-gathering and sharing, they are performative. These digital platforms are metaphors for the ways in which we view what they assemble: tumbling through images, for instance. Interestingly, they are also vehicles for real-time composition making.
[8] Object-Oriented Philosopher Tim Morton asks: “How can we account for the beginning of a thing…what does beginning mean?” In answering this question, he refers to Aristotle and the phenomenon of aperture. Morton interprets Aristotle’s poetics of beginning, middle, and end to mean that “things have a feeling of beginning, a feeling of being in the middle [which he calls development], and a feeling of ending (closure). Beginning, middle and end are aesthetic—so we can use them to talk about causality, since we have established that causality is aesthetic.” See Ask/Tell.
[9] This stance on the curatorial is not new to my practice. For the past decade I have wondered: How can one curate an exhibition without being didactic? Or, more precisely, how can one curatorially enact meaning by providing an experience through which to “read” an exhibition other than with/by explanation and description? Or in writing: how can one write an exhibition into being—or write it as a parallel experience—rather than write about an exhibition. I am particularly interested in the ways in which curators might performatively enact modes of viewership through new approaches to didactics, for example. By didactics I mean how we frame an idea. A didactic is in many ways an abstraction—it gives a certain form to thought and in this way often pins down the meaning of an artists’ work that could otherwise stay open. Didactics (i.e. those panels we find in exhibitions near an artwork or at the front of an exhibition that explicitly states the theme as authored by a curator), as an example of what I am trying to re-order here, tends, for example, to reduce an art work’s meaning by fixing an interpretative frame for it.  For me, this is where the curatorial gets confused with curating.

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