Curatorial appraisal: March 24 at 9pm

On March 24 at 9pm, I went to the JAG, with a bag of pencils, charcoal, tape and some Handy Andy, to execute a curatorial appraisal of the exhibition thus far. Finding my intentions of maintaining the order of the exhibition in spite of weekly changes thwarted by various factors, understaffing at JAG probably being the most effective of these, I set out to appraise the exhibition as a whole and look frankly at its shortcomings (and try to make something of them).I wanted this appraisal to have some manifestation in the exhibition spaces, but I didn't want it to adopt any of the textual forms that are proper to the exhibition  and are already present in it, coding it as a museum exhibition. So I rummaged in my bag and picked the charcoal and decided to find the margins of the exhibition, metaphorical or real, and write, by hand, in those.

Within a traditional museum exhibition, which is more-or-less what Time's Arrow started out as, the wall spaces between pictures, captions and standard vinyl wall texts are treated as at once sacred and invisible. Almost no one spends any amount of time examining the bits of wall between works, unless there is something wrong with them, and in the latter case, curators generally hope that if nothing can be done about the grotty walls, no one will notice them. I decided that these bits of wall would be my margins to start out with, and I went about marking all the places in which the purity of this space had been disrupted by a screw left in the wall from a removed picture or a pencil line marking the height of a painting.

Then  it occurred to me that the wall space below the dado rails is very seldom used in exhibitions at JAG (as it is well below eye-level), and in this sense it is properly marginal. I devised an autodialogue which would give readers some insight into my earlier circling activity, and transcribed that in the space below the dado rail.

As Rodan Kane Hart's work makes more wall space available for the rest of the exhibition, I will add questions and answers to this text.

An important notice about changes this week (23 - 28 March)

Since Monday March 22 was a public holiday (and the JAG closed), the changes that would have been made today are being made on Tuesday 23 March, with some final addititions to the show taking place on Wednesday 24 March. The exhibition will remain open to the public while we work.

Two new works are being added to the exhibition in the next two days. The first is a data artwork by Tegan Bristow, which graphically represents various archives of taxonomical information sourced in the JAG annual reports. The second is an installation by Alexandra Makhlouf that interacts with and modifies prior exhibition material.

A great new addition worth seeing is James Sey's video installation Sublimation and Reversibility, which was installed last week.

An installation view of James Sey's Sublimation an Reversibility, a video projection and installtion that took painting x-rays from the JAG archives as its starting point.

If you are not interested in seeing works mid-installation, you might prefer toavoid the exhibition on Tuesday and Wednesday morning and visit instead from Wednesday afternoon onwards. Visitors are, however, welcome in the exhibition space at all times during gallery opening hours.

Regimented changes

For the four weeks of Time's Arrow's installation at the JAG, the show has been changing on a weekly basis according to a regimented program prescribed by Rodan Kane Hart's art new artwork for the show, Developments of Space. Rodan responded to the artists' brief with a work that would force weekly curatorial changes in the largest room of the exhibition by means of a moving line that causes a displacement of artworks as it gains ground in the room. The movement of this line is marked in the space with white insulation tape, and the displacing line moves two metres along the length of the wall every Monday.  In place of the displaced works, photographer Mikasa Sonnenberg is displaying photographs I have decided to respond to Rodan's work by removing other works each week, rather than moving and rehanging them as the line approaches. made this decision because I felt it would be more interesting to highlight how duration on a gallery wall carries with it an implicit value ascription. I have found this disciplined programme of removal difficult precisely because certain sequences of works that I felt were strong or that were popular with viewers had to be removed relatively early in the exhibition. The removal of William Kentridge's video Mine, particularly, made some people very grumpy. Picking a bit of vinyl text off the wall  letter by letter - a citation from Jacques Derrida's Memoirs of the Blind of which I am very fond - was almost heartbreaking. So far the line has spared any new works made for the show, but I am quietly dreading its arrival at Thenjiwe Nkosi's Gallery paintings and Alex Dodd's installation Making Room. It is hard to break the habit of thinking that certain works deserve more wall-time than others, that preservation and endurance are signs of importance.

This is what the exhibition looks like for now:

Serge Nitegeka's Equilibrium flees the approaching line.

Mikasa Sonnenberg's photodocumentation of the shrinking exhibition

A view of the northern-most end of the exhibition. On the left wall is Murray Kruger's Archiving Absence, text excerpts from a series of interviews with JAG librarian Jo Burger which will later be incorporated into a video documentary.

The three changes the exhibition has undergone so far have established the process of regular modification in the exhibition, and from now until the end of the month, while the regimented movement of Rodan's work will continue, other changes will be made in response to the exhibition's own progress, its public reception and curatorial difficulties, mistakes and successes. Regular updates and warnings of these changes will be posted on this blog from now on.

Some images

For those who are eager to see what the show is all about, but haven't yet managed the journey to the Johannesburg Art Gallery, here are some photographs taken by the excellent Simon Marcus.

 An installation view of the exhibition in week 1.

 

 Alex Dodd's installation Making Room, which uses works from the

JAG Collection, found objects and a text written by Dodd. 

 Thenjiwe Nkosi's three paintings Gallery 1 (1915), Gallery 1.1 (1940s)
and Gallery 1.2 (1980s)

A better view of Thenjiwe Nkosi's Gallery paintings

Alexander Opper's work

Accumulation #1 (approximately a century's worth of cornice dust from the Johannesburg Art Gallery)
(found dust on paper)

Phillip Raiford Johnson's Running Clock, a working digital stopwatch with flourescent tubes.
The clock runs in minutes and hours and is attached to a movement-sensor device that causes it to reset whenever someone walks past.