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• 1 2016-02-21T18:10:34-08:00 A Dramaturgy for Curating Process 6 path 2 plain 2016-03-22T17:08:14-07:00 Dramaturgy, like curating, is simply a process of finding an appropriate presentational format for the subject under investigation. (Behrndt and Turner, 26) From my perspective this means a process of thinking approaches to composition, and, in fact, inventing new forms through new approaches to thinking. Exhibitions are a form of rhetoric but the rules they follow only ever follow the rules they set out for themselves. This is how they communicate, indeed perform, in the continuous present.
   
  For Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table, the structure of the exhibition as process-oriented and object-oriented is a parallel methodology that stages in real-time the working principles of Stein’s play and thus elucidates something about the play’s rather cryptic “meaning.” Yet, since there is no real “content” in Stein’s play, the task of “framing” is a particular challenge dramaturgically: the exhibition performs Stein’s play and is not about Stein’s play. An exhibition-as-rehearsal explores a kind of open-ended dramaturgy, a way of keeping “structure and content … dynamic and continually … in process, rather than as elements to be fixed and resolved.” (Behrndt and Turner, 30) In Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table, curatorial decisions are made in the performance-making process and as a condition of this process. Here, curatorial thinking is performative and object-oriented.
   
  In Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table, exhibition is not a noun, it is a doing form made in and through its exhibit-ing; a process laid bare and an abstraction that is also the performance of the play. The rehearsal is also a technique.[16] To understand Stein’s play we must construct a methodology for thinking, writing, reading, and exhibiting that focuses on relations and the role that objects play in their arrangements. This exhibition is a laboratory where the text is to be explored and experimented with. This is not an engagement with Steinian poetics through citation. This is a rehearsal of her ideas about composition in exhibition form. Stein’s still life is a process. Its rehearsal (which is also its staging) is also a way to learn how to curate process more effectively.
  
   

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  [16] I use the word technique with reference to Erin Manning and Brian Massumi’s practice of “event conditioning.” They contend that collaborative modes of thinking are practices that move between techniques of relation. They discuss this idea through what they call “enabling constraints,” which is a method through which to facilitate a co-generation of effects. I liken this concept to the way in which Rehearsal for Objects Lie on A Table is conceived as a proposition toward a real-time exhibition making practice. See Thought in the Act, in particular pages 92-93.
• 1 2016-02-21T17:18:26-08:00 “In doing this thing, I hope to find out this question.” (Stein, How Writing is Written, 156) 5 plain 2016-03-22T13:48:09-07:00 Time-sense has a number of implications in this exhibition, just as time is a condition of the exhibition making sense. Time in this sense is certainly not yet fixed—neither by space nor by concepts. Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table is a thought in movement, but one that never repeats even if it begins again and again like in a rehearsal. Rehearsals move the idea of the curatorial too: from the exhibition as the culmination of a thought process to its beginning of a process of thinking. The rehearsal of this play is a practice-form of curating in the present tense. As an exhibition that composes itself in/over time, it creates its own time-sense: the exhibition is the composition as it materializes, changes, and recomposes. 
  
  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.