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• 1 2016-02-21T17:21:00-08:00 “What is a relation?” (Stein, Objects, 105) 4 plain 2016-03-22T15:59:17-07:00
  How does a play from 1922 relate to today? Any contemporary staging of a historical play must ask this question. But in following Stein, repetition = innovation. In Portraits and Repetition, Stein makes a distinction between different types of repetition, herself favouring its potential as a mode or rhetoric of invention, which she calls resemblance, rather than becoming a dogma, which she likens the role that memory plays in repeating ideas or experiences (we only need to think of memory in relation to tradition to understand how it could become dogma). For Stein, repetition without memory means that each time a thing repeats, it is with a different kind of insistence and thus difference.[10] Much of Stein’s repetition (of words and phrases in her prose and poetry) is a dramatization of this condition. And this is no less true for the arrangement she makes in Objects Lie on a Table.
   
  There are other ways to relate 1922 and 2016 time, too. Michel Serres’ conception of contemporaneity counters time as an “irreversible line.” (Serres and Latour, 48) Time, according to Serres, can “make co-possible two contradictory things” (49), in this case two different centuries and thus two different “compositions.” Accordingly, both can be active in our time—this way of thinking constitutes a special kind of arrangement. Wonderfully, Serres uses a domestic metaphor to explicate (or “un-pleat”) how connections can be made across time. Kneading dough, the baker “makes folds; implicates something that his movements then explicate. The most simple and mundane gestures can produce very complicated curves.” (65) This notion of folded time is key to understanding composition as something that is being-made and being-engaged but that also includes multiple temporalities and time-senses that can fold into a composition across time periods. Stein is both in our time and of her time. Folded into the exhibition Stein is both contemporary to her time and ours.
   
  By including Stein in my exhibition, I am making a claim that she is a contemporary artist—that is, she was asking questions in her time that are equally relevant to our time, questions about relationality, systems theory, process thinking, and the ontology of objects. Here, all the artists in Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table are working with Stein by rehearsing her innovations in compositional arrangement and thus creating her work in the present-tense of the exhibition while simultaneously creating their work in the exhibition. Stein is “presentified” in this exhibition as much as the still life is. But the still life we create as the exhibition is a composition for our time.
   

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  [1] There is a glaring difference between the Hart House of 1922 and 2016 that can’t be ignored. Women were not allowed in the house until 1972! And, coincidentally for my project, it was only through the Hart House Theatre that their entry was made permissible. See Wikipedia for more information on the history of Hart House.