#Exhibition
'There is no such thing as a copy. In the world of digitalized images, we are dealing only with originals—only with original presentations of the absent, invisible digital original. The exhibition makes copying reversible: It transforms a copy into an original'
Boris Groys, ‘From Image to Image File and Back: Art in the Age of Digitalization’
I think of an exhibition as the public moment for art. More particularly, I would argue for exhibitions as the durational fields in which people engage with each other and the world as enabled through art.
Gah, exhibition as echo chamber?? I’m going to interject another voice. This is Fred Moten: ‘The blur of spirit admits of no personhood, just as art is a constant violation of the artist, the viewer and the work that is the mobile location of their entangled differentiation.’ That work is the exhibition.
What of the exhibition as medium, as resonance – as the space and time for reverberations? A site for re-soundings, not for simple agreement – simple fusion, simple harmonies, not the echo chamber, but where dissonance can be really be heard, as a quality of relations.
Potentialities of being suggested by curation/space/art and a (g)host of audience factors such as promotion, wealth, cultural capital and how hungry you are. When an exhibition dictates limits on these factors it is better thought of as a machine that produces experiences.
The virtual tour of ‘A strange weave of time and space’ is not the same as the exhibition, but rather a translation. Like all translations, it is a wedding. It has something borrowed and something new.