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
12016-03-22T13:20:08-07:00Emelie Chhangur2d057680e6c2808d559b662d85db94eee62664f783111installation view March 18, 2016plain2016-03-22T13:20:08-07:00Emelie Chhangur2d057680e6c2808d559b662d85db94eee62664f7
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12016-02-26T21:28:47-08:00We have displaced them because we have replaced them. (Objects Lie on a Table, 109)11plain2016-03-22T17:27:44-07:00In rehearsing this play, artworks thus reveal a funny thing about an exhibition’s gestalt: a theme is no longer in the foreground, supported by a set of chosen works that illustrate it. Here, artworks frame the exhibition and performatively interpret the play, enacting the play’s operative principles within a different discursive framework—the ultimate stage set for Stein’s play, modelled as it was on conventions in the visual arts. Themes or concepts in the exhibition are of the exhibition and do not follow prescriptives (like parts of speech freed of predication). Meaning is created (and undone) by changing the arrangement of the exhibition or through experiments the artists make with processes that lend themselves to unsettling conventional modes of intelligibility. Liddington’s still lives point to innovations in the genre that rival Stein’s own radical approach to compositional arrangement, similarly proposing ways to (cheekily) “represent” a still life through performative techniques, such as through collaboration(The fruit of our joint labour …, 2015), or by applying two-dimensional compositional approaches (drawing) to three-dimensional arrangements (Two Views of Bananas ..., 2015). Frames perform in this rehearsal, too. As in Stein’s play, they hover somewhere in between foreground and background. DeFreitas’ untitled (these textile works) No. 10 & No. 29, 2015 frame and are framed by the wallpaper on which they are hung. The exhibition design likewise plays with ways that meaning can be re-framed, both conceptually and spatially.Liddington's Weighted Dancers Under a Spotlight..., 2016, is presented in the gallery’s storage space. But now this space is no longer a “behind the scenes,” or a “backstage.” What is it doing here? Weighted dancers under spotlight… dries over time and the form compresses and shrinks as it settles into itself—that’s what it is doing here—a process that is, in fact, hardly detectable in one visit to the space, no matter how well it is explicated by its “frame.” Just as frames can point to other things not going on in the “picture,” the works in this show perform, but not always for us.
12016-02-23T19:28:29-08:00Weighted dancers under spotlight (I realized the most sincere means of capturing their movement was to allow the clay to bend as it had wanted to, then and always), 20169plain2016-03-22T13:26:05-07:00Derek Liddington, Weighted dancers under spotlight (I realized the most sincere means of capturing their movement was to allow the clay to bend as it had wanted to, then and always), 2016. Clay and marble. Courtesy of the artist. For this work Liddington looks to dance and the role gravity plays in conditioning movement. The composition is based on a photograph of two dancers set in a pose that requires each other’s support. In Liddington’s representation, bodies are allowed to “fall,” fold, or collapse as the clay dries over the duration of the exhibition and material performs.