The tableau has come off the wall.
The apples looked like apples the chairs looked like chairs and it all had nothing to do with anything because if they did not look like apples or chairs or landscape or people they were apples and chairs and landscape and people. They were so entirely these things that they were not an oil painting and yet that is just what the Cézannes were they were an oil painting. They were so entirely an oil painting that it was all there whether they were finished, the paintings, or whether the were not finished. Finished or unfinished it always was what it looked like the very essence of an oil painting because everything was always there, really there…
This then was a great relief to me and I began writing. (Stein, Pictures, 235)
Objects Lie on a Table could be considered a conversation between material objects and the spaces that are shaped by their presence, their relations, and their arrangements. (Stein, Objects, 108) The play is a composition that takes the still life (and arguably Cézanne’s pictorial approach to painting)[3] as a prompt and considers the activities of its composition to be a network of objects and relations—an entangled presence brought to life through the writing technique of the continuous present. Stein’s process was operational: the application of the continuous present to the logic of the (Modern) painting’s form. Formally, Stein’s compositions were dialogues with structure and interrogations into the conventions of genre. Stein’s play does the form: it is composed in the act of arrangement.[4]
Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table stages the original play’s structural logic as a composition that never settles into place and as a processual happening always in-arrangement. I believe that the only way to think and make and do Stein is to co-learn her compositional strategies through direct experience. This exhibition explores arrangement heuristically. As Stein states in her lecture Plays, “knowledge as anyone can know is a thing to get by getting.” (244) Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table follows Stein’s operational approach to writing a still life as a rehearsal for her play and as the creation of a (new) still life by taking a process-based approach to curating. The exhibition is also an étude. This essay constitutes my dramaturgical notes and research for the exhibition and the play.[5]
[2] “Intra-acting” is a term borrowed from Karen Barad, a physicist who “diffractively” reads quantum field theory through the lens of post-colonial, feminist, and critical race theories. For her, intra-acting is a constitutive force operating within phenomena. Phenomena (which might be likened to the exhibition as a field, rather than as a series of individual entities set in relation) are the entirety of entangled forces intra-acting. Within the field, or phenomena, all things pertaining to the “composition” are folded into its ontological becoming. See Meeting the Universe Halfway.
[3] For a more detailed discussion on the relationship between Cézanne’s and Stein’s approaches to composition, see Wendy Steiner’s Literary Cubism: The Limits of the Analogy.
[4] Even though she wrote many, for Gertrude Stein plays were problematic. For her, the issue with theatre and the performance of plays for an audience was related to tempo: “the thing seen and the emotion did not go together.” (244) Stein also had an issue with the theatre’s curtain. Its presence contributed to its emotional lag: the emotion delivered on stage was not synchronous with the emotions felt by the seated audience: one was always located on one side of the curtain. This is important to my exhibition in that I attempt to position the viewer in the midst of the exhibition’s composition, as it is happening, rather than forcing a viewing audience to understand the exhibition as it is already laid out in advance, which is usually the case of curated exhibitions. The audience of my exhibition is never behind the action that is taking place; audiences are, in fact, part of its dynamic composition simply by coming and going and they witness the composition as it is being arranged by the artists who are in the gallery during the duration of the show. Similarly, writing plays for Stein were exercises in dramatic composition, which is to say performative composition, composed in the present liveness of a moment. To overcome what she called “nervousness” (247) at the theatre, Stein insisted that writing a play must engage with its own action, meaning it must be written with reading, hearing, and seeing in mind. It must write as performance and not be a text that is later performed. Stein acknowledged that plays were either “read, or heard, or seen” (244) but she did not want to make one method of interpretation follow the other. All this is key to thinking about how to contain thought in the present moment. An exhibition that creates its own meaning as it takes form means meaning is only ever synchronous with its becoming form. Form begets more form. The end of the exhibition is a record of its rehearsal, a material trace of the process of staging Stein’s play as a rehearsal and “in rehearsal” and thus it is never finished, not in the theatrical sense of being polished or presented. Rehearsal here is also related to keeping the process of theatrical exploration—or the dramatization of an exhibition’s thematic rather than a narration of it—in process as the thing itself. See Plays.
[5] As a dramaturgical framework for this essay, I use the technique of collage to layer and juxtapose ideas and the academic digital publishing platform SCALAR to disrupt the linearity of traditional modes of writing, and thus of reading. Of course this technique also speaks to pictorial innovations of Stein’s time period but also our own: think Flickr, Tumblr, Instagram, etc. All of this relates back to how we can think through arrangements and make new kinds of compositions.
