Scenes from the House Dream : The Exhibition as Oneiric Scene

In recent years, there has been a transformation in the relationship between the artist and the exhibition space, a space that may serve as a narrative framework, material, motif, or subject — an entire world to be reinterpreted. Assuming the role of curator, the artist takes over the site in order to present broader artistic proposals that overstep the boundaries of artwork as installation and open up a different aesthetic and experiential space, within which the visitor is an active part of the envisioned experience. Like the polyphonic novel analyzed by Bakhtin,1 1  - Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).  these dialogic works are inhabited by plural voices: that of the creator, of course, but also those of the people who receive them. The exhibition space is thus understood as an entirely separate realm, in which all of the subjects who experience it are invested. 

For instance, in 2013 Philippe Parreno integrated his past and current works into the remarkable space of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris to offer a strange museum-like choreography within the building’s monumental architecture. Taking Baudelaire’s words, “Anywhere, Anywhere, Out of the World,”² 2 - See Charles Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris, Petits poèmes en prose (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 220. as the title for his exhibition, Parreno imbued his work with the enduring oneiric, virtual dimension valued by the poet and unique to this type of exhibition-artwork. In the same year, also in the context of a retrospective exhibition, Pierre Huyghe imagined a Centre Pompidou populated by different forms of life with which visitors would have to cohabit. At MoMA PS1 in New York, two years later, Samara Golden created The Flat Side of the Knife, an immersive installation that combined material and illusory spaces to provide access to further layers of consciousness.