Exhibition : What Makes an Exhibition Within an Exhibition?

In recent years, artists, curators, and museums have been using exhibitions as sites of unprecedented exploration. This essay brings together, in fragmentary form, a series of strategies and examples that are helping to redefine the exhibition. Although the different modalities discussed here seem to have little in common at first glance, seeing them in relation to each other gives an indication of the extent to which the exhibition — its functions, mechanisms, discourses, and histories — is now the subject of examination and critical reflection. Where and when did this reflection originate? Although this question is worth asking, given recent histories of exhibitions1 1  - See these two fundamental books: Bruce Altshuler, ed., Salon to Biennial – Exhibitions That Made Art History. Vol. I: 1863 – 1959 (London: Phaidon, 2009); and Bruce Altshuler, ed., Biennials and Beyond – Exhibitions That Made Art History, Vol. II: 1962 – 2002 (London: Phaidon, 2013).  and the attempts to theorize their different models2 2  - See, notably, Jérôme Glicenstein, L’art : une histoire d’expositions (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, “Lignes d’art” series, 2009)., the contribution that I wish to make here is concerned less with providing a historical or theoretical perspective, than with describing different approaches. I thus offer a sort of inventory, without considering linearity or chronology, of seven ways in which artists, curators, and museums are rethinking the exhibition. The title of this article, “Exhibition2,” emphasizes how current experiments are being challenged and their self-reflexive dimension, as much as it stresses the importance of this emerging area of study. In other words, the idea of this inventory is to show the potential for questions that the exhibition raises today. 

1. Artwork as Exhibition 

These days, with artists attaching as much importance to the conditions under which their works are presented as to how their works are produced, the boundaries between artwork and exhibition are often difficult to discern. Le discours des éléments (2006), by the BGL collective, is a case in point, as it pushes the relationship between the two to the limit. It is one of the most challenging contemporary installations in the National Gallery of Canada’s collection. Bringing together ten works produced during the collective’s early years, between 1996 and 2006, as well as a panoply of studio materials and sundries, this vast installation held the artists’ first “retrospective” exhibition.³ 3 - Here is a non-exhaustive list of the artworks, elements, and project models produced between 1996 and 2006 that are contained in Le discours des éléments: the motorcycle from and video of the performance Rapides et dangereux (2005), a stuffed moose (Venise, 2004), various pieces of hand-sculpted wood (two from the phone booths of Rejoindre quelqu’un, 1999), many of the boxes and gift wrappings from À l’abri des arbres (2001), the car made of wood and cardboard from La guerre du feu (2006), the wooden framework from Chapelle mobile (1998), Bosquets d’espionnage (2004), Le pouvoir de la fuite (2005), and Marche avec moi (2003); there are also the remains of burned wood sculptures, materials of all sorts, and paint cans heaped pell-mell on the shelves.  It is not only one of BGL’s most complex works, but one of the most difficult to inventory and re-exhibit. Its form resembles a warehouse space and museum’s storage area, where works are crammed together on shelves on either side of an aisle. Le discours des éléments is also typical of how the collective recycles and reuses materials, as well as its own works, always reserving the possibility of reorganizing and reconfiguring them in response to the exhibition space. The different elements may also be presented as a single installation or separately as autonomous works. By assembling the first ten years of its production in this way, BGL reiterates and transforms the conventions of the retrospective and encourages the museum to review its acquisition, documentation, and exhibition norms.