“Objects on a table and the explanation.” (Stein, Objects, 105)
Concerned with the happening as it is happening and less so with categories and reflection, Stein saw processes as either “of” or “in” composition. The “of” marks a particular time-sense related to one’s time period and the “in” marks the ways in which a composition is arranged as a set of real-time events taking place. The exhibition, Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table dramatizes the connections between “in” and “of,” among other relations, as we shall see.[1]
But, compositions are not simply arranged in order to make meaning legible, especially in what I am calling performative curating—a methodology that uses the continuous present as a dramaturgical approach to exhibition making. Here, meaning emerges through the ways in which arrangements make compositions and relations, and, in fact, other objects. To curate in the continuous present is to keep arrangement alive: compositions are instantiated through acts of arrangement as a condition of their own making. Making sense by making itself, composition is meaning in arrangement. And, importantly for exhibition making in the present tense, one that questions its own gestalt.
[1] As Stein sees it, artists make compositions that are often not understood by their contemporaries because they are not making work about the present, but in the present. Stein believes this is why artists are often appreciated only after their time has passed, when the thinking has caught up to the propositions made in the artists’ work. She states in her lecture Plays: “the business of art is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to completely express that actual present.” (251)
And an example from RIGHT NOW:
Portraits & Repetition is a new film by Berlin-based artist Juliette Blightman commissioned by the South London Gallery, presented as a continuous online screening for one year on a purpose built online screening platform.
And an example from RIGHT NOW:
Portraits & Repetition is a new film by Berlin-based artist Juliette Blightman commissioned by the South London Gallery, presented as a continuous online screening for one year on a purpose built online screening platform.
