Linking Paper for the Open House: A Portrait of Collecting Curatorial Project

(2019)

 
Note: The Linking Paper was intended primarily for the doctoral pre-examination board. This document may be useful as an overview of how the project connects to my research, but it is not necessary to review it before visiting the exposition.

The movement of ideas, materials, objects, and bodies is inherent in my approach to developing exhibitions. This linking paper connects aspects of the Open House: A Portrait of Collecting exhibition project to my research on choreographic thinking in curating.

Project Summary

The exhibition Open House: A Portrait of Collecting, was a curatorial project I developed at the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy (PEA). The exhibition, on view from January 19 through February 28, 2015, featured a variety of institutional and personal collections. A parallel project, Significant Objects: Meaningful Objects from the PEA Community, which showcased individual objects and their stories, was nestled within the larger exhibition.

Motivations for the Open House: A Portrait of Collecting Exhibition

The motivation for this exhibition was my own discovery of an untended collection within the Lamont Gallery, a non-collecting entity housed within an academic institution. The gallery was created in 1953 as a kunsthalle: a space for temporary, rotating exhibitions. Because of our non-collecting mission, we lacked a comprehensive collection inventory, had no collections management or conservation plan, did not conduct scholarship or curricular integration of the collection, and had no staffing or appropriate storage. No one seemed to know why we had this motley assortment of objects, or why we kept being offered more.

My frustration was not that we had all these objects squirreled away, but that I did not have the organizational capacity to address them.

Part of the journey of this linking paper, and of my development of the Open House exhibition, is to map how my thinking shifted from a somewhat stagnant frustration to a more generative exploration through choreographic thinking.

How to Do Things with Objects

As a non-collector, I have an ambivalent relationship with objects. The questions that emerged from my initial frustration of the discovery of the collection included: What drives us to consume and keep items ranging from ticket stubs to cut glass? How do institutions use collections? How are collections (or objects) understood as knowledge? How do collectors share their collections, and what does this act of sharing produce?

At the start of the process, I wondered how I could do things with these seemingly arbitrary collections objects—how to get them out of gallery storage and get them proper care and attention. Despite my own inclinations, I began the exhibition planning with the approach of a more traditional curator/choreographer/director: setting movement, agency, and placement upon bodies—or, in this case, upon objects.

Fortunately, my curiosity saved me from my own habitual and professional gestures of needing-to-know and having-to-show. I shifted my thinking from frustration to exploration. As the project unfolded, it became less about how I (or others) could do things with objects, a unidirectional gesture, than how objects themselves could do things. The project strove to foster connections between people, objects, and memories, instead of about them.

Choreographies of Responsiveness

The Open House curatorial project was generated through, and characterized by, movement. What if, instead of thinking about a collection of objects through the filter of art history (artists, eras, styles) or through functionality (paintings, clocks, textiles), or through themes (activism, trade routes, childhood), I used other methods of addressing the collection and the questions it raised? What if I left aside what “went together” and turned toward what happened when things alongside each other produced difference rather than sameness, opportunity rather than certainty?

Megan Nicely describes the impact of choreographic thinking in the artistic process:

Choreographic thinking indicates the ways ideas arise in multiplicity during the process of moving. From this perspective, movement is the movement of thought not requiring something outside to motivate it—particularly not the planned execution of a singular concept, which closes down options.[1]

My shift in thinking—paying attention to what moved me, might be described by Erin Manning, whose theories inform my research, as transduction, and notes this movement is: “a jump in register that incites a new process.”[2] The questions I asked became movements of thought that were catalyzed by the (previous)(potential)(anticipated) movement of things, and vice versa. By attending to what emerged, I could be responsive instead of predestined: a choreographic approach, rather than a stationary one. What did the objects propose? Where did the collectors’ desires, wishes, and interests lead?

Taxonomies of Movement

I came to identify certain types of movement in conjunction with specific stages of the project. Gathering was the initial gesture, which echoed the etymological roots of “collection,” which refers to “a gathering together.” It was not simply a gathering (a reproduction of a score set upon an unsuspecting body) but a gathering together. In this phase, I tried to approach my initial questions with curiosity. In the process of gathering my thoughts, I landed on how and why collections are shared, and the impact of that sharing.

I viewed the experience of locating and contacting collectors as extending and looping movements: reaching out with an inquiry, pulling back to let those inquiries enter into dialogue with the collections I already had secured, and reaching out again.

Next, I stood back to gain a sense of the field. What had I brought together? What shape did it take? The act of considering all the institutional and individual collectors together, with their diverse collections, divergent subjectivities, and varied viewpoints on their objects and their reasons for collecting became an assembling motion. Not an assembling as summons, but assembling as building, together.

Arranging the exhibition itself was an exercise in making intersections between objects, ideas, collectors, and visitors. What happens when you bring one space (of an object, or an idea, or a display) into conversation with another without leaning too much on the art historical or museological? What if these conversations brought forth affective registers and relations, springing from the compulsion to collect and the desire to share?

Significant Objects: Meaningful Objects from the PEA Community, a project where individual employees contributed personal objects and reflections, extended my inquiry more into the realms of the emotional and relational. Contributors considered why an object was meaningful to them in the past, and what it meant to them today. Sharing was an experience of moving and being moved.

Outreach and programs were characterized by holding and touching. Programs offered a place to pause and to hold an object or idea (sometimes literally), to sit with it, to contemplate it. Objects, particularly those that lived with their collectors, revealed their tactile qualities: their worn corners, their frayed edges, and their repairs, lovingly-made.

“More-Than” Objects

My final reflective text, “Constructing a Memory Palace,” is about the affective “surround” of objects—their “more-than,” as Manning might say, and how this more-than is a composition in physical as well as mental space. A choreography of relations through the mechanism of joint attention to an object. This choreography “is the relational force-field not of bodies per se but of the active intervals their relational movement creates, intervals it taps into to make felt the more-than of a given movement composition.”[3]

Open House was a compositional exploration into how objects and collections catalyze affective and material movements: between objects and personal memories, between collector and viewer, between private storage and public staging. The compositions that resulted at each stage produced encounters between things not previously in contact. Encounters led to unexpected conversations, which facilitated new ways for objects to become active agents that do things to, with, and for us.

Bibliography

Manning, Erin. Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance. Durham/London, Duke University Press, 2013.

Nicely, Megan. “On Choreographic Thinking.” IN DANCE, 1 March 2014. https://dancersgroup.org/2014/03/on-choreographic-thinking/.