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8/19/2015 Fillip / Measures of an Exhibition: Space, Not&nbspArt, Is the Curators Primary Material (Carson Chan)

http://fillip.ca/content/measures-of-an-exhibition

Fillip 13 Spring 2011

Measures of an Exhibition:Space, Not Art, Is the CuratorsPrimary Material

May this prize be won by themultitudes recently congregated,and may the promise be fulfilledWisdom and knowledge shall bethe stability of thy times, and thestrength of thy salvation.

To know is to experience,without which one can only

believe. When the other disciplestold St. Thomas that Jesus hadbeen resurrected, he doubtedthem, making it clear that only byinserting his finger into the placeof the nails and his hand into theopen wounds would he believetheir claim. Only through

physically prodding Jesussunhealed wounds for himselfwould he know. Knowledge, itsformation and attainment, hasbeen a source of philosophicalfascination since antiquity, andthrough technology we havelearned to aid ourselves in itsacquisition. Knowing onespurview also increases oneshunger to know beyond it, and in

Notes

1. Rev. George

Clayton, Sermons

on the GreatExhibition,

Preached in York

St. Chapel,

Walworth(London:

Benjamin L. Green,

1851), 36.

2. John 20:25.

3. Anna Jackson,

Expo: International

Expositions 18512010(London: V &

A Publishing,

2008), 10.

4. Bruce Altshuler,

Salon to Biennial:

Exhibitions That

Made Art History

(London: Phaidon,

2008), 1213.

5. Ibid., 13.

6. Nathalie Heinich

and Michael Pollak,

From Museum

Curator to

Exhibition Auteur,

in Thinking About

Exhibitions, eds.

Bruce W. Ferguson,

Reesa Greenberg,
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http://fillip.ca/content/measures-of-an-exhibition 2

the nineteenth century, propelledby technological advances incommunication, trade, andtransportation, this growing desireto know gave rise to a new outletto meet it, a spectacular type ofpublic enlightenment: the large-

scale international exhibition. In1851, the Great Exhibition of theWorks of Industry of All NationsinLondon showcased the latestdevelopments in commercial andindustrial products from aroundthe world, allowing those in or ableto get to London firsthand accessto information of anunprecedented scope. By the time

the exhibition had closed, morethan six million visitors had seenthe fairs 100,000 exhibits.

Though the Great Exhibitiondidnot present any fine art, everyinternational exposition thereafterdid, establishing a model for theinternational art exhibitions thatwould soon pervade Europe.

Before the world expositions, artexhibitions in Europe were mostlyfashioned after the French Salon,which displayed paintings assurfaces that covered entire walls.Evolving directly out of the WorldsFair, the large-scale art exhibitionbecame popular as a type ofpresentation where art signifiedmore than its individual creator

and became representative of anational style, a declaration ofnational identity and strength.

The first of these government-sponsored art exhibitions washosted in Munichs Glaspalast bythe Bavarian state in 1869; themost esteemed and enduring ofthis type is the Venice Biennale,

and Sandy Nairne

(New York:

Routledge, 1996),

242.

7. For a thorough

account of the

changing role of

the curator, see

Robert Fleck,

Teaching

Curatorship? in

MJManifesta

Journal: Journal of

Contemporary

Curatorship(Milan:

Silvana Editoriale,

2008), 25.

8. Harald

Szeemann, WhenAttitudes Become

Form (Works,

Concepts,

Processes,

Situations,

Information)

(London: ICA,

1969), reprinted in

Harald Szeemann:

with by through

because towards

despite(Zurich:

Edition Voldemeer,

2007), 225.

9. At least within

the European

context, the

curators growing

popularity amongst

the general public

was articulated inearly 2006 by Zitty

magazine, a

German weekly.

The cover story of

the March 16 issue,

by Birgit Rieger,

was titled Kunst

ist Pop. It likened

the space of the


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which was inaugurated in 1895.

Today, both the world exposand the large-scale exhibitionsroles as central institutions for thedissemination of new artisticideas, positions, and discourse ingeneral are largely usurped by

more technological forms ofcommunication, includingcommercial print, television, and,most pervasive today, the Internet.The large-scale exhibition, stillextant and once seen as anefficient means to physicallycommunicate new knowledgethrough display, is now ineffectualcompared to the near-

instantaneous broadcast of image,text, sound, and video over theInternet. The biennial exhibitionsmission as a measure of artisticzeitgeistits social networkingfunctions notwithstandingisrendered redundant when thelatest output of information can beaccessed online. In recent years,

Web sites, blogs, and e-mailmessages from museums,galleries, art publications, and,indeed, artists themselves havebeen driven into a flurry ofcommuniqus. This economy ofinformation traded by artsprofessionals is energized by aFaustian desire to keep current, inexchange for, or even perhaps at

the expense of, the firsthandexperience of art. As the Internetbecomes the primary medium withwhich most art practitioners learnabout new artworks andexhibitions, the subsequent in situviewing of artwork constitutes adoubling of the art experience.(This doubling condition is even

gallery opening to

a nightclub; both

are where people

find a semi-public

venue for meeting

up under the guise

of consumption.

The cover of this

issue asked in boldletters: Are

Curators the new

DJs? See Birgit

Rieger, Kunst ist

Pop, Zitty, March

16, 2006, 1619.

10. Elena Filipovic,

The Global White

Cube, in The

Manifesta Decade:Debates on

Contemporary Art

Exhibitions and

Biennials in Post-

Wall Europe, eds.

Barbara

Vanderlinden and

Elena Filipovic

(Brussels:

Roomade and

Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press,

2005), 73.

11. Sven Ltticken,

Once More on

Publicness: A

Postscript to

Secret Publicity,

Fillip12, 8691.

12. Andrea Phillips

goes as far as tosay that locating

both art and

education in sites

like biennials

where theyre

aestheticized as

disciplines in fact

negates the

authority of both.


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more apparent with architectureexhibitions, their main componentbeing printed images of buildingsthat are easily viewable online.)Contrary to St. Thomassincredulity, we seem to haveconfused the thingwith its

representation, knowledge withhearsay. This doublingphenomenon delivers a newimperative to curators to makeexhibitions that provide spatialcontexts where artworks, new orfamiliar, are presented in a waythat would require visitorsphysical presence for their fullapprehension. Large-scale

exhibitions, like biennials, are nowpredominantly administered bycommittee and organized byteams to illustrate an agreed-uponthesis. They are never singularly

authored, despite often beingattributed to a single curator.Products of consensus, theresulting shows offer up work from

the latest rotation of artists and,unsurprisingly, betray a generalsense of interchangeability. Thecontemporary art show has arecognizable look. In truth, the glutof uniform, routine, andplatitudinous exhibitionexperiences highlights adimension of exhibition-makingthat is still quite absent in much of

the more rigorous discussions oncuratingthat space, not art, isthe curators primary material.

The ascendance of the curatoras auteuroccurred parallel to theincreasing popularity of theinternational art exhibition.Starting in the 1960s, whenindependent European exhibition

See Andrea

Phillips, Education

Aesthetics, in

Curating and the

Educational Turn,

eds. Paul ONeill

and Mick Wilson

(London: Open

Editions, 2010).

13. Virginia Blum

and Heidi Nast,

Jacques Lacans

Two-Dimensional

Subjectivity, in

Thinking Space,

eds. Mike Crang

and Nigel Thrift

(London:

Routledge, 2000),183.

14. Jonathan Crary,

Suspensions of

Perception:

Attention,

Spectacle, and

Modern Culture

(Cambridge, MA:

The MIT Press,

2001).

15. Ibid., 13.

16. Ibid., 361.

17. Boris Groys,

Art in the Age of

Biopolitics: From

Artwork to Art

Documentation,

documenta 11,

trans. Steven

Lindberg(Ostfildern-Ruit:

Hatje Cantz, 2002),

10814.

18. Antoine Picon,

Digital Culture in

Architecture(Basel:

Birkhuser, 2010),

193.

19. Ibid., 195.


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makers like Harald Szeemannutilized exhibitions asopportunities to enactsociopolitical ideas through thetemporary display of art, the roleof the curator began its transitionfrom overseer of museum

collections into free authorityand trusted foreseer ofdevelopments in contemporaryart. Operating as an intermittentcollaborator with art institutions,the independent curator needed toconnect and mediate disparatediscussions about artist selection,budget, display, and thematicconcerns that were previously

divided amongst museum staff.Their access to artists as well asadministrators gave them a uniqueposition and a critical distancefrom institutional traditions thatlicensed them to instigate changeand question established practicesin exhibition making. Szeemannsbenchmark exhibition, When

Attitudes Become Form(1969), atthe Kunsthalle Bern, was more of avenue for the curator to stage hisideas about the potential powersinherent to the inner bearing ofthe artist and how these forces

are unleashed in free and wantonattitudes toward material than itwas a month-long opportunity toexhibit works of the sixty-nine

individual artists involved. ThoughSzeemann called the exhibition acompendium of stories told in thefirst person singular, it becameobvious that the first personsingular voice he referred to wasactually his own, as compiler ofdisparate practices, media, andstyles. The exhibition, not the

20. Ibid., 197.

21. Alex Gartenfeld,

Aids-3D in Real

Life, Interview,

September 2,

2009,

http://www.interviewmaga

02-09/aids-3d-

new-museum-

generational/,

accessed June 30,

2010.

22. Sarah Cook,

Immateriality and

Its Discontents: An

Overview of Main

Models and Issues

for Curating New

Media, in NewMedia in the White

Cube and Beyond,

ed. Christine Paul

(Berkeley:

University of

California Press,

2008), 29.

23. Jack Burnham,

Real Time

Systems,Artforum8, no. 1 (September

1969), 4955.

24. Charlie Gere,

Art, Time and

Technology

(Oxford: Berg,

2006), 127.

25. Jean-Franois

Lyotard, Les

Immatriaux, inThinking About

Exhibitions, 16265.

Furthermore,

tracing beyond

Jack Burnhams

milieu, from which

Conceptual art

began, Robert

Zimmer has

detailed how all art


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artwork, became the independentcurators autonomous object ofstudy, and, as artist and writerLiam Gillick has pointed out, bythe 1990s, when art critics startedforging more alliances with thecommercial world, they effectively

abdicated their critical role, whichcurators inherited. By the 2000s,when the establishment of a large-scale iterative art exhibition cameto stand for a citys culturalmaturity, and the curator in boththe professional art context andthe publics eye grew in celebrity,

curators were being hired toproduce at such an excessive rate

that, to keep up with demand,exhibitions were reconceived asformulaic commodities,consumable through a pressrelease and accompanyingimages. To provide content forthese exhibitions, cosmetically,lectures and discussions werehabitually employed as stand-ins

until in the 1990s, when theseauxiliary programs becamenormative and even constitutive ofexhibition making. CatherineDavids edition of documenta X in1997 included an insurmountableprogram of lectures, filmscreenings, discussions, andpoetry readings, called 100 Days100 Guests, alongside the art

displayed. David found theexhibition of visual art unequal tothese other formats inrepresenting global contemporaryart production. Damningly, shecalled the art exhibition merelythe support and the vector of theother forms. At museums, the

recent favouring of the lectern

springs forth from

concept and that

the perception of it

constitutes the

primary strategy

for interpreting

and recreating the

world. See Robert

Zimmer,Abstraction in Art

with Implications

for Perception,

Philosophical

Transactions:

Biological Sciences

358, no. 1435 (July

2003), 1288.

26. Judith Barry,

DissentingSpaces, in Thinking

About Exhibitions,

308.

27. Charlotte

Klonk, Spaces of

Experience: Art

Gallery Interiors

from 1800 to 2000

(New Haven: Yale

University Press,

2009).

Image: Franz

Erhard Walther,

Sockel, vier

Bereiche (Keeping

the Canvas Square

in Shape), number

49 and Connection

(Head), number 31,

from 1. Werksatz,

1967. Photo byTimm Rautert.

Courtesy of Peter

Freeman,

New York.

About the Author

Carson Chan is an

architecture


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within the exhibition context hasbeen called New Institutionalism,and critics have observed that itsexponents are probably lessinterested in education as a modeof knowledge production thanthey are in the sheer quantity of

material generated from asimulation of discourse and aparody of intellectual exchange.

Already in 1972, at documenta 5,curated by Szeemannwho oncehad trust in the publics receptionof ideas through exhibitionsawinter school was set upostensibly to introduce coherenceto the work of the 622

participating artists. documenta 11(2002) was supported by recurringplatform seminars, and aleitmotif of documenta 12 (2007)was education itself. Repositioningexhibitions as a corollary orparallel to lectures changed theway they were perceived andconsequently produced. Large

exhibitions are now often placesfor the display of artworks thatconfirm external claims, ratherthan events that are themselvesgenerators of knowledge. Whatwas meant to reinstate theintellectual function of the formharmonizing exhibitions withlecturesin fact rendered it voidand expressionless in the absence

of its pedagogical crutches oftextual and oral discourse. Wherecurators claim intellectualpositions in texts and lectures, theattending displays of artworksimply provide illustration. Thoughunrealized, Manifesta 6, theEuropean Biennial ofContemporary Art 2006, was

curator and writer.

He is co-founder of

PROGRAM, a non-

commercial

initiative for art

and architecture

collaborations in

Berlin. He is a

contributing editorto 032cmagazine

and has recently

been appointed

curator of the 4th

Marrakech

Biennale (2012),

with Nadim

Samman.

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conceived of as a schoolagesture of revision that traded theexpressive potentials of theexhibition form for an extra-institutionally validated organ ofintellectual production. Whatbinds these examples is their

emptying of the exhibitions role asan interface between new artisticideas and the public; a plightedsituation fuelled by their curatorsdistrust in the exhibition as a placefor the production anddissemination of knowledge, asyndrome that has recently beentermed curatings educationalturn.

It is clear that the physicalencounter with objects,particularly artwork, is singularand non-reproducible, but to whatdegree can this distinctness bechallenged through technologicalmediation? If representation cannever replace its original referent,what constitutes the

aforementioned doubling whenviewers experience art both onlineand in physical reality? As for theproduction of subjectivitywithinlate capitalismboth object andimage are things that are simplyother than the self. For

Jonathan Crary, this subjectivitywas shaped in the late nineteenthcentury alongside technological

forms of spectacle, display,projection, attraction, andrecording. Central to Crarys

thesis is that through theprocesses of modernization andrationalization, vision has changedfrom being a mode of opticalperception to an effectof theforces of modernity. The features

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of vision in the twentieth centuryonwardsits qualities varying inrespect to what is being viewedare that it has no features.Rather, Crary states, it isembedded in a pattern ofadaptability to new technological

relations, social configurations,and economic imperatives.

Crary cites a conversationbetween Fredric Jameson andAnders Stephanson in which theyspeculate that as thesocioeconomic logic of capitalismperpetuates itself, well berequired to accept as natural thecondition of switching our

attention rapidly from one thing toanother. What we see, whetheronline or in physical reality, isreconfigured into what we payattention to and for how long.Attention, as it were, is what wecan term the various ways ofseeing that have become fused bythe powers of modernization into

an institutionally constructedsubjectivity. Inflicted bodily,modernization has made ourattention become both asimulation of and compensationfor a chimerical realexperience. The direct

experience is thus outmoded. Forthe large-scale exhibition thatseeks to present new work, our

attention to it would most likely becaught first online.

Although the Internet is fastbecoming a venue and medium forartwork, art online is relayedmostly through texts, images, andvideos. Focusing mainly oninstallation art, Boris Groys hasmade a case for reconsidering the


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classical distinctions between theobject and its representation in hisessay Art in the Age ofBiopolitics (2002). Proceedingfrom his observation thatdocumentation of art has beenmaking its way into art spaces in

recent decades, Groys, like Crary,situates our culture within the latecapitalist system, but heforegrounds the biopoliticaldimension in our lifeworld, whereobjects and their representationare both produced through atechnically supportedunderstanding of life. In acharacterization of a post-

industrial, biopoliticallytechnological world that findslineage in the thinking of GiorgioAgamben and Anthony Giddens aswell as Antonio Negri and MichaelHardt, Groys elides life and art asbeing traditionally constituted aspure activity. Art was inaccessiblewithout the production of end

results or artwork that signifiedlife. Life, and thus art, asreconfigured through biopoliticaltechnologies like planning,decrees, statistics, and technicaldocumentation, now occurs intime. Life became lifespan, acategory inflected by politics, andso art also became automaticallypolitical. Groys claims that art

made under the regime ofbiopoliticsart that signifies alifespanis by definition artificial,as lifespan is itself artificiallywrought through biopoliticaltechnologies. Within thisrationalization, the differencebetween the living and theartificial is, then, exclusively a


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narrative difference. Narration,

rendered through documentation,evokes the unrepeatability ofliving time. Documentation is ableto narrate a history, a fictionalontology that injects the artificialwith life. Art documentation,

Groys concludes, is thus the art ofmaking living things out ofartificial ones, a living activity outof technical practices: it is a bio artthat is simultaneously biopolitical.(Artificial here refers to artproduced within the age ofbiopolitics.) Groys continues byupdating Walter Benjamins well-known assessment of the art

original and its loss of aura after itwas technically reproduced. ForGroys, the real difference betweenthe original and the copy is itsproximity to the viewer/consumer.If we make our way to theartwork, then it is an original, hesays. To wit: individually motivatedaction defines the status of the

objects authenticity. What Groyscalls make our way to, Crarywould term pay attention to, andin both of their ideas we see thedirected will of simultaneouslymediated and mediating subjectsintendingtheir experience suchthat the experience is produced bythe intention. In other words, if artsince Duchamp was what the

artist willed as art, subjectiveagency now harbours the ability towillart, at least as a category ofperception, from anything.Artwork, or any other trappings oflate capitalist culture, alone cannever hold down the storm ofshifting signifiers, never ensure aconsistency of their signification.


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once computable was alsoforeseeablesay, grain shortageyet today, we have becomeaccustomed to a world in whichthe most unpredictablephenomena [for example, financialmarkets] are often based on

computable processes. Inother words, the digital systemswe have constructed are gainingsteer over physical reality as theygrow in verisimilitude, incomplexity, and in uncertainty.Though still true today, the notionthat art materially encounteredexpresses more than its onlinerepresentation will soon shift; itsonline cognate will not show less,it will show differently.

Without entering into adiscussion of the socio-spatialpotentials in augmented realitytechnologies, particularly inmobile telephony, I will point outthat the main difference betweenthe apprehension of information-

events online and in physicalreality is that it is incomparablyfaster onlinehours of travel areatomized to milliseconds of ping-time. Particularly in the artcontext, information portals like e-flux and e-artnow send out e-mailannouncements to hundreds ofthousands of recipients each day,notifying a worldwide community

of curators, artists, directors, andcritics of exhibition openingsaround the globe. Artists, galleries,and museums are represented byWeb sites from which their outputcan be remotely accessed andconsumed in the form of texts,images, videos, and soundrecordings. The career of young


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American artists Daniel Keller andNik Kosmas, collectively known asAids-3D, took off online beforethey were recognized in reality, soto speak. After exhibiting theirnow-famous OMG Obelisk(2007)in a student exhibition at Berlins

Universitt der Knstea largeblack rectilinear column with theletters OMG spelled out inelectroluminescent wires, flankedon both sides by altar flamestheartists put an animated .gif file ontheir Web site, the flicker of theflames set in motion by the switchbetween the .gifs frames. Thetransformation of the pieces

physical state into a digital fileallowed for its immediate andsimple delivery, resulting in itsappearance on computer screensaround the world. The piece andthe artists gained popularityonline, and by 2009, the work wasmaterially reconstructed andexhibited at the New Museum,

New York, in a group exhibitioncalled The Generational: YoungerThan Jesus. By the artists ownaccount, both the pieces onlineappearance and physicalinstallation are to be seen as asingle gesture conceived in toto.

In this way, OMG Obeliskdoesnot exist in multiples in thetraditional sense, but rather in

spatial and formal plurality. Eventhough Web-based art wasalready institutionally legitimatedby its inclusion in documenta X in1997, it was presented as staticand offline, and only now are weseeing an actualization of digitalspace as ontologically viable andoperable for art and its


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dissemination. Already in 1969,

artist, critic, and theorist JackBurnham created a systems theoryof art in his article Real TimeSystems, published inArtforum. By transposing the art

system into an information system

he called galleries, museums,and art historians long-terminformation processingstructuresBurnham separatedart from its material incarnation bylikening art concepts to software.The art object is, in effect, aninformation trigger for mobilizingthe information cycle.

Burnham created a newframework for addressing artwithout returning to pre-technological categories anddefinitions. Like software, we canunderstand art uploaded intovarious material and non-materialhosts. This reconceptionapproaches the shift from art asmaterial to substance and from

physical to mental processes.As thematized in Jean-FranoisLyotards exhibition LesImmatriaux(1985), it is a shift thatseems all the more active today,evinced by the growing number ofpractices devoted to concepts,performance, atmosphere, and, ofcourse, the Internet.

So, finally, how is the artexperience doubled? How can thecurator help reconstitute the first-hand experience, particularly inlarge-scale exhibitions, from thearbitrating pressures of the latecapitalist world? Crarysreconfiguration of perception intoattention, which allows us tocompare online and physical


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experiences of art, together withGroyss merging of art with itsdocumentation permits a furtherdiscussion of alternatives toestablished practices in exhibitionmaking. Previously, I outlined howlarge-scale exhibitions have

become emptied of their functionas an effective survey of the latestartistic ideas, how digitalcommunication has supplantedthe large-scale exhibition in thisrole, and, furthermore, how theInternet is becoming a site inwhich art is not only representedbut actualized and validated. Forexhibition makers and curators,

this condition presents both aneed and opportunity to repositionspace, rather than artwork, as theprimary material in exhibitionmaking. If art can be apprehended,if not experienced, apart frommateriality, the physicalexhibitions raison dtremust beconceived of as an experience

structured around the exigenciesof tangible space. Particularly forgroup exhibitions, where artworkby different artists is exhibitedwithin the same space, the matrixof influences and relationshipsspatially manifested between theworks, which forms the context, isalways foregrounded, rather thanindividual artistic statements. The

exhibition space, more than aplace in which art is displayed, isalso the carrier of the combinedaims of the artists, curator, and thesupporting institutions. As such,the artists autonomy, their uniquepractices, become incorporatedinto the curators motives for theexhibitionthe exhibitions author


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is the curator, not the sum of thevarious artistic desires.

Curators, beyond selectingexhibitors and administering thelogistics of display, are themediators between the artworkand its audience. If artists are

composers, then curators are theirmusicians; their purpose is to givevoice to the artists work, theircreations, in a way that isintelligible to viewers. Thecurators instrument, the materialthey shape to deliver the variousartistic voices, is the exhibitionspace. Art installed incorrectly iseasily distorted in its intentions.

The curator considers theexhibition spaces dimensions,sociohistorical context, expectedaudience, and infrastructure (e.g.,lighting) in making decisionsabout how and where to locateartwork to generate and mold theparameters of the exhibitionexperiencethe aesthetic and

intellectual scope, or purview, ofthe space.El LissizkysAbstract Cabinet

(1927), first shown at theLandesmuseum in Hanover, hasoften been cited as an earlyexample of activating theexhibition space itself to expressideas. Creating the small chamberin which paintings were shown,

Lissitzky mounted his works alongwith ones made by other artists onsliding panels that visitors wereallowed to move in order todetermine the works visibility and

juxtapositions. The panels wereinstalled on vertical slats affixedonto a grey wall; painted white onone side and black on the other,


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the room appeared to be adifferent colour depending onwhere one stood. Though Lissitzkycalled for spectators at exhibitionsto become active participantsrather than passive viewers, theunderlying idea was that the

design of the displaysspatiallymanifested as an extension of theart objectwould beinstrumentalized for the task.

Employing the exhibition space asthe medium of expression doesnot necessitate the performativityof its surfaces. Instead, the wayspace is sensually perceived byvisitors already provides a store ofpotential manipulations in whichto produce an environment thatcan express, or at the very leastdirect, an experience that conveysthe intentions of the exhibition.Ultimately, the call for a concerteduse of space as a material is acritique of the status quo inexhibition making today. Like

images of exhibitions from almosta century ago, the majority ofexhibitions today remain devotedto a modernist toolkit of whitewalls, ceiling mounted lights,paintings hung at eye-level, andneutrally placed sculptures thathas become the de facto solutionfor exhibition making. Space is thevehicle for the exhibitions

meaning. How the exhibitionspace is lit, how the visitor enters,how the artworks are sequentiallyintroduced and encountered, thefootfall, the temperature, and theecho are all embodied by thevisitor and readily assailable asvocabulary in the burgeoninggrammar of curatorial expression.


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Giving space to a particularrealm between the privateinstitution and the public sphere,exhibitions allow for culturalvalues to be inscribed collectively,while the way they are experiencedforms a subjective position within

each visitor. The knowledgeproduced by the exhibitionexperience, beyond the particularfacts imparted, comes from thenon-replicable, firsthandsensations specific to the self-directed way each visitor movesabout and takes in the exhibition.The exhibition experience,impossible to fully predetermine,can nevertheless be scripted andchoreographed by the curator in away that best conveys both theexhibitions and the artistsintentions. Late capitalismmediates our daily life in such away that the causes of its effectsare vague and untraceable; to thiscondition, the curated exhibition

provides contrast. In deliberatelyshaping the particulars of theexhibition space for the purpose ofcultural dissemination, the curatorprovides a space where theconcepts, themes, and ideastheexhibitions expressionaredirected at the viewers expresslyfor their acknowledgment. To thedegree that a curator can

accomplish this within a giventime will determine the size of theexhibition. Relieved of its role ofuncovering the newest artwork,perhaps the biennial exhibition willdecrease in size to focus itsresources on the intensity of thevisitors experience rather than thequantity of displays.


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measures of an exhibition

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