Exhibition as Artwork

The exhibition has been the subject of much analysis and many transformations in recent decades. Numerous artists have rethought the relationship between the artwork and the exhibition, notably by treating the latter as a medium or device. The result is a multiplication of ways to manage or appropriate the museum space, not only through exploration of new formats or modalities but also by the reactivation of more classic museographic apparatuses (dioramas and period rooms, among others) or the restaging of historical exhibitions in faithful or revisited reconstructions. Liberated from being simply a means of display, the exhibition has become an artwork in itself. As a consequence, today it is practically impossible to separate the exhibition from the curator’s work (or the artist as curator). The thematic section in this issue is thus a natural extension of the special sections in two previous issues of esse: Curators (no. 72, Spring/Summer 2011) and Re-enactment (no. 79, Fall 2013).

As an introduction, Marie Fraser, professor of art history and museology at UQAM, who proposed this theme, presents an inventory of seven possible exhibition models. While not exhaustive, her overview gives an idea of the many directions taken by exhibition curators and the impact of critical reflection on the staging of artworks. Aside from the particular cases presented in Fraser’s survey, illustrations of some of these models can be seen in the exhibition analyses published in this issue. But in doing this, are we in the process of contributing to the creation of a canon of exhibition models? If, as Jérôme Glicenstein proposes, “a canon of exhibitions — that is, a body of shared references, [peut] which might serve as a reservoir of models for apprentice curators” — exists, it is nevertheless worthwhile to remember that canons are often selective, or even exclusive, as Griselda Pollock emphasizes in her book Differencing the Canon¹. 1 - « Cependant si des artistes – parce que ce sont des femmes ou des non-Européens – sont tout à la fois exclus de l’histoire et écartés de l’héritage culturel, alors le canon devient, au fils des générations, un filtre de plus en plus appauvri et appauvrissant si l’on se réfère à l’ensemble des possibles culturels. » Griselda Pollock, « Des canons et des guerres culturelles », Cahiers du Genre (février 2007), n° 43, p. 5-69.. Glicenstein concludes, in his article here, “It is also a question of the manner in which this writing issues from an ‘institutional inscription’:[la formulation d’un canon]that legitimizes it and that it addresses.” This question remains on the table.