Exhititing and Collecting Ideas: A Montreal Perspective

Exhibition as Atmosphere

Showing Work

 

In the Exhibiting and Collecting Ideas article, Zardini states that curating, which “[places objects] in a new context” will “inevitably contaminate [them] with a new discourse.”  Despite the negative vocabulary, he goes on to express that this is not only a positive contamination, but one that pushes the boundaries of various fields outside their comfort zones into new intriguing territories—that it is not simply about putting some disparate objects in the same room and calling it a day, its about creating a unique story that expresses relationships in a previously unseen way.  The Urbach articleExhibition as Atmosphere goes one step further by suggesting that a curated collection isn’t just about creating a story, its also about manufacturing an atmosphere or mood to force the understanding of the collection in a certain way.  He uses San Francisco’s notorious fog as the agent of change for how we view and experience the city.  The actual city itself remains unchanged, but the fog has literally wrapped it in a doubt that makes us question and reinterpret what we previously understood to be the forms, lights, distances, scale, and objects that constitute the collection that is San Francisco.  The Lavin article, Showing Work, questioned the use of the word “work” when applied to all things architecture.  Maybe I didn’t read it carefully enough, but she seems to be very personally offended by the changing of her own field, as evidenced by her needless complaints about curators creating work out of the work of others, which she even admits “adds new players and possibilities to the field.”  Although I find her bitterness very distracting (I struggle to sympathize with her enough to stick around for the point she’s trying to make), I feel like her argument is hinged on one very narrow and specific definition of one word.  “Work” is an all-encompassing term to describe the stuff that we do every day to earn a living.  It doesn’t matter whether that stuff is plumbing or painting or curating—its all work.  So for her to fixate on whether Venturi’s legitimate work was his architecture or his theory, for example, makes me completely uninterested in what this woman has to say.  I’m doing many overlapping things right now – thinking about the article, typing this response, posting it to a blog that I’ve spent time formatting—for a class that involves a bunch of other different assignments—to get a professional degree from a school—to get a job drawing handrail details or something for the next 5 years—to spend enough hours to earn me the right to take a series of tests—to pass those tests to earn a professional designation that will finally allow me to “work” in my profession.  Where is the work in all that?  I think Lavin would argue that I’m not actually doing anything right now, nor have I been for the past two years, nor will I until I earn that $160,00o stamp.  I think she would grant me the caveat that I am following the “protocols of connoisseurship” outlined by my profession, but that’s about it.  In response, I would tell her that work is effort with the promise of payment (monetary or otherwise) and that she shouldn’t try to cheapen my efforts with her inability to adjust.