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
Installation view, East Gallery. Terrarea with an Arrangement with roses by Diane Borsato on round table. Photo: E. Chhangur
12016-03-22T12:37:29-07:00Emelie Chhangur2d057680e6c2808d559b662d85db94eee62664f783111Gallery Arrangement on March 20, 2016plain2016-03-22T12:37:29-07:00Emelie Chhangur2d057680e6c2808d559b662d85db94eee62664f7
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12016-02-23T17:22:48-08:00HAPPY IS TO SEE WHAT IT DOES!10tag for the tableau has come off the wallplain2016-03-22T12:39:12-07:00 From the beginning, this exhibition arose out of a shifting set of arrangements, which is not entirely surprising considering the play it is rehearsing. An arrangement, after all, is another way of making future plans. So, even if we “begin” with Stein and her 1922 play Objects Lie on a Table, in many ways the “arranging” we undertake in this exhibition continues throughout its duration. What began with a selection of pre-existing works has resulted in an exhibition composed almost entirely of new works, soon-to-be “re-arranged” works, and about-to-happen works. In part, these changes are the culmination of the artists’ idiosyncratic engagement with Stein’s text. Naturally, each artist was interested or inspired, intrigued or perplexed in or by a different aspect of Objects Lie on a Table: be that an actual object mentioned in the original text; ora particular writing technique of Stein’s; or the way in which Stein explored form through its performance in another genre (a still life in a play); or even, simply, by one of the writer’s enigmatic and maddening turns of phrase. In other instances, works in the exhibition—especially those that directly reference “still lives” — innovate approaches to arrangement that re-frame relations between subjects and objects. They thus gesture toward our contemporary composition or “time-sense,” as Stein would call it. Through this process of re-ordering, re-arranging, and re-staging, that is, continually rehearsing the play, the exhibition has become the play in the form of a series of art works that interrogate the play’s conventions in a similar fashion (one presumes) that Stein’s play interrogated those of Cézanne’s still lives. The exhibition, like Stein’s play, does the form; its meaning is composed in the act of arrangement. In this sense, the process of making this exhibition has been as much an investigation of the play as the exhibition itself is a dramaturgical framework for the play’s “performance” at an art gallery. And this investigation does not end just because the show has opened—this is an exhibition made in the continuous present. All the artists were involved in the arrangement of the exhibition (i.e., its floor plan)—which was a dialogue around the play and its operative principles, and which began almost immediately after we embarked on this genre-bending experiment. Enacting the principles of the play in our process of arranging the exhibition, this “background” activity is as much a part of rehearsing the play as the concept of a shifting, or modular, exhibition design is a foregrounding of the “dynamic” nature of Stein’s still life.