Curating in the Continuous Present: A Rehearsal For Gertrude Stein's Objects Lie on a TableMain MenuA Detective Story“Objects on a table and the explanation.” (Stein, Objects, 105)The tableau has come off the wall.How to Write (in and of time)“In doing this thing, I hope to find out this question.” (Stein, How Writing is Written, 156)“Act so there is no use in a center.” (Stein, Tender Buttons, 63)“What is a relation?” (Stein, Objects, 105)“It is by no means strange to arrange.” (Stein, Stanzas in Meditation, 143)Re-Arranging Rhetoric“With which part of the arrangement are they in agreement.” (Stein, How to Write 136)What might the rehearsal of this play mean for exhibition making?path 2A Dramaturgy for Curating Processpath 2Rehearsals for Curating Reversalspath 2And afterwards. Now that is all. (Stein, Composition, 6)essay conclusionWorks Citedbibliographic informationEmelie Chhangur2d057680e6c2808d559b662d85db94eee62664f7
Derek Liddington, baseboard: There we were looking at the most beautiful sunset ever..., 2015
12016-03-24T10:06:03-07:00Emelie Chhangur2d057680e6c2808d559b662d85db94eee62664f783111Located on the front gallery desk, making the desk a subject of the exhibition or, emphasizing it as a "ground" to the exhibitionplain2016-03-24T10:06:04-07:00Emelie Chhangur2d057680e6c2808d559b662d85db94eee62664f7
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12016-02-27T08:41:20-08:00Unsettling the Frame6plain2016-03-24T10:13:13-07:00Even in the case when an artwork is presented in the exhibition as fixed or static, we discover in its position a strange way to think about movement and agency, both by way of its placement and the way in which this placement disrupts the perceptual order of things. Works cast in roles otherwise reserved for display as “background”—such as wallpaper (DeFreitas) or baseboards (Liddington) or scent (Cohene)—change “planes” and the hierarchy of the senses: walls become art works or they frame baseboards, which themselves become artworks, and scent changes the way we see. Things are also “out of place”: in DeFreitas’ although it sometimes gives the illusion of paint (No. 10), 2016, or in Borsato’s Tea Service…, 2013, flowers and cups are no longer arranged on a table but are now found on the wall. For Cohene, the arrangement of a scent’s composition is also a matter of political importance. Composed entirely of middle “notes,” Lovey, 2016 disregards the hierarchy of arrangement traditionally exemplified in the manufacture of scent—generally made of tops, middles, and bottoms. Lovey is a “background” scent, too.
Composed of all the elements that surround the flower—dirt, thorn, stem, rot, etc. Lovey approximates the smell of a rose without being rose. Switching roles, frames dissolve: what is traditionally background material in Stein’s play (setting, backdrop, stage direction, etc.) moves to the foreground and the subjects (or dramatic action, character, etc.) are off doing something somewhere else—in another room in the house, perhaps. Relations are thus a part of the composition, but they are also set apart from the arrangements, busily questioning what exactly renders some things ground to others. When given their own role, relations can unsettle systems of representation.