It may seem odd that I devote a section of this exposition to aspects of Being & Feeling (Alone, Together) that never happened because of the pandemic.
These aspects included installation components that were never built or only created at a modest scale, events and programs that never occurred or that happened only partially, furnishings that were never placed in the gallery for live audiences who could never visit, letters that were never written, experiments that were never tested, follow-up exhibitions and programs in Helsinki that were never produced, and aspirations, inventions, and possibilities that never materialized.
The things that never happened resisted measurable outcomes. They became truncated, altered, and speculative, rendered so by necessity, uncertainty, and exhaustion.
Yet, things did happen, in another sense. Artistic research does not just generate results that take physical form, knowable in some final iteration as consumable evidence. The planning and orchestrations of events and activities that do not result in “things” are things all the same, even if they are primarily objects—or movements—of (choreographic) thought.
Your Point Would Be?
All curatorial projects have these elements. All artworks, exhibitions, and performances have loads of material that ends up on the cutting room floor, left behind in rehearsal rooms, or jotted down in notebooks to be unrealized and unused.
I was initially reluctant to write about these elements. I felt it would be rewarding an anxious need for affirmation. Perhaps I simply wanted credit or recognition. Perhaps I was wrestling with feelings of loss and abandonment, made even more potent by my impending departure from the Lamont Gallery.
With some distance, however, I determined that the missing or unrealized elements are very much part of the project, and are connected to how choreographic thinking operates in my curatorial practice. By examining the “never-happened” moments, I could imagine the skeletal structure that produced the core motor of the project, which I fantasized looked something like Theo Jansens’ Strandbeests.
Collectively, these events, attempts, and propositions, realized or not, were movements: the anticipated actions produced shifts in perception that informed how I saw the interconnections between artists, objects, audiences, and experiences.
These speculative elements are in a state of suspension, to emerge in future curatorial gestures, still to be imagined.
The plan for the opening reception, scheduled for Thursday, 26 March, was to have the evening headlined by a performance event called Feeling All Your Feelings. Performers included faculty, staff, and students who were prepared to deliver spoken word, music, and other pieces that centered on the emotions surrounding their own experiences and memories. The works were personal, the feelings vulnerable. Some of the presenters had never performed their stories in this manner. My aim was to highlight voices that had not yet "taken up space," on campus, literally or metaphorically.
I have always been surprised, moved, and inspired by the process and the effects of performance in the gallery, particularly in smaller spaces such as the Lamont Gallery. A few years earlier, a colleague and I hosted a spoken word event and outfitted the space with small cabaret tables and LED candles, an atmosphere I had hoped to recreate for this event.
FAYF was to have been followed by the audience coalescing into smaller groups for intimate, guided conversations, a step I had not taken in previous performance events. I felt that a semi-structured opportunity for intentional, multigenerational sharing and exchange in a welcoming setting was much needed.
Because the gallery is set within a residential high school, our audience includes adolescents. It is no great surprise that high school students like to lounge. They like to sprawl, slump, drag, strut, and even, on occasion, skip. As adults, we have as much to learn from them as they might learn from us. By listening carefully and consistently to students’ ideas, I came see there many ways the Lamont Gallery could become more holistic and inclusive.
The built environment could contribute to this evolution. We could conceive of someone’s first encounter with the gallery differently (such as my plan for installing a wall-size magnetic poetry board at the entrance). We could examine the conventions of how and why we installed certain works. We could give people places to sit, rest, exchange, and peruse. We could offer an atmosphere more gregariously aware of its civic and social roles.
Seating was one area I revisited constantly: how to arrange the sturdy but unyielding mahogany and black leatherette gallery benches that were part of the gallery's original seating in 1982? How to integrate tables and chairs of various types and sizes? (I recalled the impact of installing a futon on the floor as we did in Clew: A Rich and Rewarding Disorientation.)
For Being & Feeling (Alone, Together), I sought seating that proposed acts of lounging that would encourage new relationships and conversations to enter the room. To be comfortable and comforted, as well as to be uncomfortable—to wrestle with our conventional attitudes and ways of engaging around challenging topics—by creating situations that required that you occupied space differently.
Some of the artwork in the exhibition addressed these conflicting sensibilities: from what location do you enunciate, or hear? What is the visuality that you bring into the space, and how is it different from mine? We cannot walk in each other’s shoes: our positionality, or privilege, make us orbit outside of one another’s experiences. Can other types of bodily engagement offer points of connection?
My first choice was the large bean bag style chairs from Yogibo. I was especially interested in the styles that could accommodate more than one person. My experience in exhibition design years earlier at the Computer Museum revealed how much more people would engage when they could sit with a friend or family member. Identity, self-knowledge, memory, and subjecthood are equally or more so products of social networks than of solitary, individual efforts.
I was also pushing back on other conventions.
Large, colorful furniture of this sort is usually not seen in US museums, except for children’s or science museums. While the Lamont Gallery is not a white cube, it is unfortunately still too easy to produce a white cube effect by the institutional context, the patterns of use, the conventions of artwork display, and the norms of bodily comportment within gallery spaces (upright, quiet, slow, contained, homogenized).
What would invite visitors to become whole selves, other selves, or multiple selves within the gallery? What type of "making space" could we promote that was antithetical to the white, male, and heteronormative histories of the gallery and Exeter as an institution? Could furniture queer the space, and us in turn?
In the end, when it was clear that the entire campus would be closed, I scaled back the plans. I decided on installing a few colorful stools instead—a modest prototype for future research in this area.
Other programs that never happened were further along in their development. As part of Being & Feeling, I had planned a variety of encounters between artists, works, and audiences. Ranging from panels and performances, to screenings and discussions, to guided walks, these programs would illuminate themes of the exhibition by way of exploration and conversation. The emphasis would be on having a reciprocal, multidirectional exchange rather than a unidirectional "delivery."
Artists were to have come in person to the gallery, visited with classes and clubs, presented and performed, and interacted with other academic departments. I hoped these exchanges would cantilever us into new territories or topics by way of a dialogic process.
Other than providing the basic architecture for the events, I could not anticipate what would happen or where things would go once we were all in the room. I imagined possible outgrowths for many of these programs. This approach is choreographic thinking in practice: I build a provisional structure, provide some supports and scaffolding, and then let things run.
In transitioning events to Zoom, I attempted to keep the rhizomatic potential of the original activity.
For at least a few of the programs—Stephanie Misa's performative lecture and Jon Sakata's event—we did find ways of bringing the original motivations into play. Stephanie’s asynchronous presentation of her performance, contextualized in a conversation about artistic research, gave the audience insights into the role of anticipation and delay in the artistic process. The program with Jon Sakata evoked the spirit of the installation by encouraging the audience to embrace an experimental mindset in relation to individual and collective perception.
Some projects for Being & Feeling were initiated but were never fully realized. Open Letter to (My) Emotions was one example.
Several of the artists in Being & Feeling worked with the ideas of address and reception. Stephanie Misa’s Transplant consisted of first-person stories of people newly-transplanted to Vienna, Austria. Riikka Talvitie’s video Omakuva (Self-Portrait) is a dialogue with herself, offered in Finnish and translated into English subtitles. Animations by Tobias Rud used pacing, sound, and drawing to craft narratives of vulnerability and connection. All of the works extended an invitation through intimate and proximate means: a personal letter or story directed to audiences real and imagined.
Letters are a powerful form of personal and political address. Open Letters responded to the work, as well as to the many open letters in spring 2020 which were sent to arts organizations about the pandemic-induced layoffs of arts and cultural workers and the critical need for racial justice, among others.
The idea was to invite additional textual voices of community members to co-mingle and converse with the exhibition: to add to the layers of artworks, events, class visits, and other programs. The submissions would accumulate throughout the spring, first as signage that would be installed in the gallery, then as a poetry month event in collaboration with the Academy Library.
These voices would make the interpretative terrain a polyphonic one.
We received three submissions before the gallery closed.
I often find ways to have the activities of the gallery leak or rupture out of the space itself, contaminating other contexts or situations. For previous exhibitions, these initiatives included installations in the athletic center, poetry interventions in campus buildings, public art pieces downtown, and student-initiated festivals.
The Louis Kahn-designed Class of 1945 Library was a regular site for these "leaks." I spent a great deal of time in the building. The staff was open to experimentation, collaborative, and supportive of the playful inquisitiveness of those of us drawn to the library for its poetic, literary, and architectural significance.
Another unrealized project for Being & Feeling, entitled Public Address/So Emotional, would have been presented on the library intercom announcement system, which was operated through an unassuming phone at the circulation desk. The program would have broadcast live music, recitations (in many languages), audio staged readings, dedications, crooning, whispered dialogues, and atmospheric sounds. It connected to, and built off of, the desire to have a chorus of community voices intersecting and interpreting some of the exhibition themes.
I got as far as testing the speaker system with a willing collaborator.
I had envisioned a film/video program, one that might link the Lamont Gallery exhibition to MUU Gallery program. Works could be presented at both galleries, as well as elsewhere: elevators, gardens, and basketball courts in the US, Finland, Japan, Austria, Mexico, and other locations, enabled by connections with participants.
Over 70 submissions came in response to the call for work. The pieces addressed themes including connection, solitude, personal history, politics, joy, and vulnerability. I kept the description open-ended—I wanted to make whatever event emerged an inclusive one that was not thematically restrictive. We did not charge an entry fee, which is often a barrier. Submissions came from an international array of artists, some well into their professional careers, and others who were emerging and student artists.
I had set up a Vimeo Pro account for the Lamont Gallery earlier in the spring, knowing that we would use it as a platform for programming. I wanted to use the Vimeo site not just as a means for presentation, but also as a space of experimentation. Not long after the deadline, I left the Lamont Gallery. I considered finding other ways to share some of the work, hoping that the MUU exhibition might still happen.
Shortly thereafter, it became clear that the MUU project would be postponed infinitely. With my departure from the gallery, it was unclear if or how the project would continue. Perhaps I could restart the project in the future ...