In search of a canon of exhibitions

One of the most visible symptoms of the art world’s recent interest in the question of the exhibition can be seen in the proliferation of re-presentations — remakes, re-enactments, transpositions — of all kinds of exhibitions seen as important. Though small in number, they are increasingly discussed and mentioned, which tends to give them a prominent place in representations of contemporary art. The most spectacular iteration is that in which an exhibition is entirely restaged, as in the 2013 presentation of When Attitudes Become Form at the Prada Foundation in Venice (Berne, 1969; Venice, 2013). Leaving aside the significant change of context — the original exhibition was staged in an eighteenth-century Venetian palazzo — the reconstruction was extremely faithful to the original, bringing together many of the same works and artists, in as close an architectural reproduction as possible, and suggesting the works that were missing. The exhibition as a whole thus resembled a new kind of period room, with painstaking attention paid to the least detail (false windows, false plinths, the ordering on the walls, imitation wood floors and tiling, and other elements).