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

Unsettling the Frame

Even in the case when an artwork is presented in the exhibition as fixed or static, we discover in its position a strange way to think about movement and agency, both by way of its placement and the way in which this placement disrupts the perceptual order of things. Works cast in roles otherwise reserved for display as “background”—such as wallpaper (DeFreitas) or baseboards (Liddington) or scent (Cohene)—change “planes” and the hierarchy of the senses: walls become art works or they frame baseboards, which themselves become artworks, and scent changes the way we see.

Things are also “out of place”: in DeFreitas’ although it sometimes gives the illusion of paint (No. 10), 2016, or in Borsato’s Tea Service…, 2013, flowers and cups are no longer arranged on a table but are now found on the wall.

For Cohene, the arrangement of a scent’s composition is also a matter of political importance. Composed entirely of middle “notes,” Lovey, 2016 disregards the hierarchy of arrangement traditionally exemplified in the manufacture of scent—generally made of tops, middles, and bottoms. Lovey is a “background” scent, too.

Composed of all the elements that surround the flower—dirt, thorn, stem, rot, etc. Lovey approximates the smell of a rose without being rose. Switching roles, frames dissolve: what is traditionally background material in Stein’s play (setting, backdrop, stage direction, etc.) moves to the foreground and the subjects (or dramatic action, character, etc.) are off doing something somewhere else—in another room in the house, perhaps. Relations are thus a part of the composition, but they are also set apart from the arrangements, busily questioning what exactly renders some things ground to others. When given their own role, relations can unsettle systems of representation.

GO BACK TO rehearsals for curating reversals

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