Time's Arrow: 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.