It ought to be, if it's not already, a truism that art exhibition functions conceptually as a larger art work in itself, one that comes apart with de-installation, its impact left to word of mouth and documentation.
Art objects take on, perhaps jettison, different meaning and aesthetic value in relation to their neighbors.
The driver can be the willy nilly of slapping work onto the wall in an old school salon style group show, where each piece fights its perhaps "unlike" neighbor for attention.
Or the meaning of exhibition can be an overt, or less overt, calculated attempt to define. In the New York Times (May 29, 2009), Holland Cotter takes on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of how "Picture Generation, 1974-1984", a current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, writes cultural history, relatively recent art history specifically, and underscores how picking and choosing when packaging "history" turns historical record into invention. Similarly, accordingly to the description, "From A Position" at the Evanston Art Center conceptually explores "the relationship between figures and the grounds which contextualize them," setting artworks as "figures referring back to the social and historical fabric they represent" and as "grounds in and of themselves creating microenvironments" for viewers. Ground is jargon for background or surrounding space in a piece of art; in the context of "From a Position," ground is better understood in my view as the space and context of presentation.
Still, exhibitions ought to enlighten, last in memory, haunt, without regard to conceptual trappings about the role, natural or directed, they play in commenting on historical record making or in commenting on viewer reception.
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