“In doing this thing, I hope to find out this question.” (Stein, How Writing is Written, 156)
The curatorial also constitutes the dramaturgical framing of the play, or, the curatorial is the rehearsal for the play’s dramaturgical staging. One need not follow the other. The curatorial is the research and hypothesis, the rehearsal its figuration, organization, and, importantly, its experiment. The exhibition registers this curatorial process as a condition of its time-sense by only ever following its own internal logic and in this way the exhibition rehearses a different time-sense for the curatorial (the thinking happens in the exhibition not before it). I might be repeating myself. But it is a repetition with a different kind of insistence (Stein, Portraits and Repetition, 168). The composition is what registers time as difference: composition as it is rehearsed in exhibition making in the present tense is the differential of time. Time is neither spatial nor ideational. And it is certainly not directional. It ebbs and folds and kneads, like dough (Serres and Latour, 65) through the performance of the artist’s works. Contemporary works made in the composition as the composition and that rehearse the time-sense of the play: a still life for the 21st Century. The curator is also part of the composition’s rehearsal, along-side the other elements of the show, along-with the artists and their objects, smells, experiments, and time-sense.
The dramaturgical staging of this play is now the rehearsal for a composition in an art gallery: the ultimate stage set for Stein’s still life, modeled as it was on so many of Cézanne’s paintings. The gallery is now, though this exhibition, the play’s play frame. And the frame is also Stein’s Salon so the activities that bind the occasion are, of course, social. This is its rhythm. The Salon is a room in the house. Its subject matter becomes the matter of subjects and its business the subjects of matter. Matter and subjects need not bifurcate and I should not make these distinctions, as we shall see. This way of thinking is neither part of our time-sense nor our composition, a composition that is also a mode of thought as much as it is a pictorial arrangement that gives order to a sense of place and time and history. The Salon is now the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, where the exhibition takes place, nestled as it is inside Hart House. And this milieu is part of the exhibition’s gestalt.
