“With which part of the arrangement are they in agreement.” (Stein, How to Write 136)
The status quo, for instance reflects a particular arrangement (of social order, belief systems, etc.). For Stein, agreement included objects and people and dialogue and action, all making arrangements but not necessarily following prescriptives, which are orders, in the double sense of instruction and arrangement. But arrangements can be rearranged. In Stein’s play this is manifested through an agreement/disagreement dialectic that continues throughout the play, but one with no synthesis or outcome other than other arrangements. We take our cue from the “nuns” that open the play. Perhaps a symbol of order and restraint, these nuns are in fact playing with objects, having "fun with funny things" (Stein,Objects, 105), altering arrangements, in other words, messing with the system. This disruptive behavior (arguing, playing with objects, having fun) continues throughout the play:“Yes. Tomorrow and then we will buy we will buy we will not buy, yes we will not buy all that we need to buy because we will not be able to agree about them. You agree with me.” (Stein, Objects, 107)
In the line following the one quoted above, Stein links this dueling perspective on perception directly to painting and, perhaps, aesthetics: “And then they said they greatly appreciate the painting of houses and objects on a table.” (Stein, Objects, 107) Cézanne too painted tables whose sides and tops you could see in a single picture plane or he captured house walls from various viewing positions simultaneously and without hierarchy in his newly invented pictorial arrangement. (Steiner, 141) This is also in Stein’s play:“He said that he respected the expression of opinion and she said, I believe in looking facts in the face. And he said and what do you see when you do as you say you do and she said I see but you and he said the same to you.” (Stein, Objects, 107)
Furthermore, multiple perspectives on objects are presented through repetition and difference. There are instances in which we are presented with the “facts” of objects-in-them-selves and as equivalences:“It is very interesting that a light or a house is sometimes on the side and sometimes at a corner and in either case it compares very nicely with the house even in the day time when the light is not lit and the house is not necessarily ready to be recognized.” (Stein, Objects, 109)
Here, objects do not affect other objects. "A rose is a rose is a rose." (Stein, Objects, 110) In other instances, we are presented with objects readily recognized:“Objects on a table are all there and I do not care to say that they have been studied. Study again and again and leave me to my wishes I wish that they could copy all of it as well as they do copy it… Have I forgotten that fruits do not remember flowers, that flowers contain what they contain and that together with fruit they do not possibly force me to be round and innocent.” (Stein, Objects, 110).
In this example “his” aunt is the ground and the objects are the figure. Objects are rendered recognizable by their use and their association with the aunt’s trade or livelihood. Objects and “characters” “know” one another through relation, be that use or— in the case of Stein’s list of the objects—proximity, even if they don’t necessarily “touch,” except through her innovations in writing, that is, her innovations in writing arrangement. The continuous present is underwriting arrangements that keep compositions alive and, importantly, open. This openness is neither authoritarian nor is it conformist. And, it includes everyone and everything: the aunt is not arranged according to “him.” Patriarchy is just another object, after all—one to be rearranged, actually.“Objects have been recognized as a knife, a pot, a pan, a cover, a ladle, carrots, apples and a salt cellar. These all have been recognized which really is not so astonishing as his aunt is a farmer and cultivates her own ground… (Stein, Objects, 108).
Curating, of course, is a mode of arrangement and exhibitions are compositions. The nature of this exhibition’s arrangement is not, following Stein, something that everyone (i.e. other curators) needs to agree on. But how we arrange has everything to do with what we end up arranging (and this makes the curator a subject and object in/of the arrangement). Arranging is a heuristic that “creates the possibilities for new forms and ways of thinking to be created” (Kirsch, 51): an arrangement can either fix an idea or it can invent new ones. And this is true for curating, too. Are curatorial compositions—that is exhibitions—meant to manage ideas, arguments, and discourse or to discover new material by way of their particular approaches to arrangement? (Kirsch, 47) Preparing, as in making future plans and exhibitions, is part of the arrangement that will condition the type of composition curating makes.[14]
What is the difference between a curated arrangement and an arrangement made curatorially? Change the verb to an adverb and see what there is to see.
[14] As a strategy, the artists in Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table are present throughout the entire decision making process, with ongoing meetings to collectively discuss ideas, read Stein’s play, and think about the different kinds of projects that transpire over the course of the exhibition, new projects composes in the exhibition over the entire duration of the exhibition. Even the floor plan is determined collectively, with regular visits to the gallery as a process leading up to the opening of the show, where another processes begin again. Every decision one makes about methodology, practice, and process informs a project's outcome. Arrangement is an ethic. Thus, the process of making a still life in movement must begin as movement with very little fixed in place. This is also related to re-thinking the gestalt of an exhibition by making what is usually in the background a foregrounded matter. Gestalt can be social practice too, one that messes with the system that puts certain people in the background and others in the foreground.