Dates: February 21 to April 18 2010 (Strike, April 19-21).
Venue: The Johannesburg Art Gallery, East Wing.
Introduction:
This time-based exhibition looks the relationship between the formation of the Johannesburg Art Gallery’s collection and how this collection is viewed, read, imagined, forgotten, enjoyed, resented, buried and dug up again years later. The exhibition will draw its organisational structure from the idea that an art collection (and the archive more broadly) is a temporal phenomenon, even though we typically think about collections spatially and objectively (i.e. in terms of the objects they contain).
A selection of works that represent a historical narrative of the JAG collection will be installed in the specified venue (the east wing of JAG) by February 20 2010. This initial chorus of works will constitute the first mark, the raw material or “the dough” of the exhibition with which we will interact and which we will modify throughout the duration of the project. Artists and writers are invited to contribute works that either constitute direct responses to works selected from the JAG collection or that address more generally the matters of temporality, chronology, origins, archival narrative, the acquisition of historical value by a work of art or the connections between JAG’s institutional history and the history of the city of Johannesburg.
These works will be selected on the basis of their significance in the JAG collection. However, ‘significance’ is not construed in terms of financial or popular value but rather in terms of the capacity of a work to suggest narrative, aesthetic or philosophical possibilities that expand the sense in which an art collection constitutes an archive.
Tentatively, this selection of works may be curated along the duration of the exhibition according to three motifs related to time and the archive: excavation, doubling or mimicry, and reversal. So far I find these motifs interesting, firstly, because the process of learning about the JAG collection is analogous in some ways to an archaeological excavation. One needs to ‘dig’ through the library archives and the store rooms themselves to uncover the stories entwined with certain acquisitions, exhibitions and unlikely events at the museum. The sense of something subterranean in an archive (the JAG collection itself is stored below ground-level) also brings to mind the fact that Johannesburg’s economy is established by the subterranean. The city’s foundations are in gold-mining and it was the mining wealth of the Randlords that established the Johannesburg Art Collection in 1910 and in 1915, the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
The idea of doubling is particularly interesting in the context of a collection in which singularity is prized. I am interested in the differences in the sorts of value ascribed to a work when it is seen reproduced in a print or online publication and when it is seen in ‘real life’. This is especially interesting given the limited exposure of South African artists and art students to the real versions of many works in European and American collections, with which we nonetheless consider ourselves familiar through our access to images of these works. The work seems to have a spectral life beyond its physical dimensions. [1]
Finally, I am interested in exploring the extent to which an archive might be reversible, that is, how it might trace the disappearance of histories and remember forgetting (rather than memorialise in order to guard against forgetting).[2] Under the next sub-heading I explain more specifically how the possibility of reversal is relevant to an exhibition built around the idea of chronology.
A note on the title:
“Time’s arrow” is a term, normally associated with the disciplines of philosophy and physics, that refers to the apparent directionality of time. Time seems to ‘flow’ in one direction and this flow is apparent in causal interactions, aging, entropy, accumulation and other processes. It would seem that archives, including art collections, as processes of accumulation, are emblems of time’s arrow. However, philosophical and scientific enquiry has suggested that time might not operate so deterministically and may in fact comprise symmetries, reversals and dissipations that are unapparent to us. In other words, the directionality of time might be a structure that is merely perceived rather than actual and effective (although, as perceiving subjects we would not very easily ascertain this).
While this exhibition uses a temporal progression as its organising structure, it also invites new works to reread or recast older ones in such a way that newer works implicitly modify those that came ‘before’ them. This occurs insofar as the dialogues between works affect the ways in which they seem to mean. This is a complex and contentious position, but why it is interesting in the context of this exhibition is because it destabilises the temporal hierarchies – particularly the notion of a traceable origin – that validate certain narratives of history in favour of others.
On a more aesthetic note, Time’s Arrow is also the title of a novel by Martin Amis in which the narrative of a Holocaust war criminal unfolds backwards (i.e. the end of the story is at the beginning of the novel, and the beginning at the end). In some sense, conventional exhibitions also begin at the end – they are ‘complete’ before they start – and in this light this project merely points time’s arrow the right way round. But in another sense, by allowing the completion of the project to coincide with the end of the exhibition, it reverses a narrative to which we may have become accustomed to the extent that we expect it of an exhibition.
Practicalities:
The placement of works in this exhibition will be organised according to a timeline or schedule. This is a little more complicated than simply curating all the works together prior to an opening, but this can be managed through good communication between myself and participating artists (or writers or curators) in advance of and during the exhibition.
As selections from the JAG collection are made, I will compile notes on these selections and make these notes and images of selected works available to participating artists. This way, contributors can develop a sense of the direction and timbre of the exhibition prior to installation and artists wishing to respond to particular works have more time to do so. The selection of JAG works will be finalised by January 20 2010. This gives contributors wishing to respond directly to the initial selection of pieces just under one month to produce their works. Other artists may wish to respond to individual works, a cluster of works or the relation of one or more works to a particular site (eg. the JAG, Joubert Park, Johannesburg). Some artists may also choose to propose works that respond to the exhibition after previous responses, as a way of approaching the archive as a temporally layered entity.
For contributors who wish to submit already completed works, (depending on the nature of the work) their works will be placed in the exhibition at a time and in a spatial configuration deemed most apt by the curator and artist (i.e. how exhibitions normally work).
What this means is that the exhibition will only be ‘complete’ at the end of the project, when it has come to the end of its duration. This is different to what we may take for granted as the conventional chronology of exhibitions, in which an exhibition is ostensibly ‘complete’ or ready in time for the opening. In Time’s Arrow the implied space of the exhibition will have to be conjured up in the visitor’s imagination by stitching together their perceptions at various moments in time.
However, the temporal structure of this exhibition does not discredit the aesthetic and narrative importance of the works themselves. Spatial and inter-objective considerations still play as important a role as ever at the various installation intervals along the exhibition’s timeline. My emphasis on time is merely an attempt to highlight the contiguity of space and time in the context of building and reading an archive. I am also interested in the implicit and explicit narratives woven into an art collection, and these narratives, besides implying a passage of time in that they are (to some degree) sequential, often invoke their own particular temporal settings.
More Practical Practicalities:
The first phase of installation will have taken place by February 7, 2010. Because the notion of an ‘opening’ is not especially suited to the format of this exhibition, there will not be an opening. For two weeks from Feburary 7, artists who are responding directly to the initial selection will have time to produce their works and curatorial modifications or interventions will take place. Then, on February 21, we will have an opening-like event, which will be open to the public. This seems more sensible to me as it will give visitors a better sense of where the exhibition is going than if they were to see only the initial installation.
The exhibition will be in a continual state of flux, with works being added and subtracted on a bi-weekly basis (depending, again, on the nature of the works proposed). While, realistically, it is unlikely that many (or any) viewers will manage to see every phase of the exhibition, each change will be documented photographically and textually and this documentation will be posted on a dedicated blog. Moreover, I find the blog medium interesting because it continues the extension of the space of the exhibition beyond physical space. The exhibition’s space, after having been temporised, becomes virtual and, in some sense, steps outside of linear time.
Deadline for proposals:
December 20, 2009
Initial selection of works from JAG collection:
January 20, 2010
Installation of initial selection of works from JAG collection
February 10-20, 2010
“Opening”:
February 21, 2010. [1] This brings to mind both Freud’s discussion of the double in his essay “The Uncanny” and the haunting work of the specter, particularly in the context of reading history, in Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and “Ecographies of Television”. Also interesting is Derrida’s argument in “Signature, Event, Context” that representation supplants presentation – in other words, a work does not appear as present with out a foundational doubling, division and repletion of its own appearance. I have simplified this terribly, but if you are interested in reading more on any of these ideas, I can send you some material.
[2] For more on this, if you are interested, see Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster and Derrida’s Archive Fever. I can help with access to these texts and my own summaries of them.
