Curating in the Continuous Present: A Rehearsal For Gertrude Stein's Objects Lie on a Table

Rehearsals for Curating Reversals

Curatorially engaging in a practice-form, such as a rehearsal (rather than, strictly speaking, a text) means mobilizing those elements that encircle what has traditionally been considered the work of curators. But here the “putting together,” “the presentation of,” “the ephemeral moment,” “the spatial situated-ness,” and especially “the thinking through connections made by accident” now are interstices. In Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table they are a means but not a curatorial ends; this reversal in process (from ends to means) marks a different kind of gestalt for the curatorial.[17] This exhibition proposes a counter-curatorial methodology that gives agency to the unsettled nature of objects and to their attendant relations in order to make the space that surrounds them a material in-movement—or another an object of equal insistence. The shifting form of the exhibition composition proposes that we get closer to the “things” that affect our everyday lives and imagine new possible relationships—or alternative arrangements—along with them. Here, an exhibition is a whole comprised of parts, including the parts of theatre: the mise-en-scene, the actors, the set, the dramatic action, etc.,) and the parts of the exhibition (object/action/art work, etc.) are wholes: they are always already entangled in the assemblage of other activities, objects, movements, artworks, and genres, etc., taking place in/of the space. The exhibition is a still life: even if the foreground and background of its pictorial arrangement in space and time is an ever-shifting set of relations. Every element is equally important to the compositional whole. The exhibition is an object in this still life, too.
 
[17] For Beatrice von Bismarck, exhibitions are constellations of objects, entities, and subjects, all with particular histories that, when set in relation, become assemblages and assemblies. Curating could be considered an actor or actant in this dynamic constellation and the curator only one part of this assembly. Von Bismarck challenges curators to think beyond the end-goals of display and to erode any residual boundaries between subjects and objects as constituted through the modern period. Curators are operating within the constellation as part of the collective. The exhibition in this context emerges also as an actant, woven into its own labour of making connections. See Exhibition as Collective.

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