ON AND ON
The group art exhibition as a co-constitutive site erected at the collision course between visitors and artists can yield cultural artefacts and interactions that give us cues as to how to conduct ourselves in our multiple webs of relationship that modernity has downplayed or severed. Group exhibitions hold value in the moment and lose this when rendered functionally obsolete, as is consistent with modernity’s destructive short-termism. As a correlate of modernity’s core defining notion of an external objective reality (consistent with a Cartesian cosmology, a weird idea to pre-moderns and now again to post-quantum mechanics) contemporary art exhibitions are typically designed as isolates: untethered and thus replicable ad infinitum in white cubes globally.
The contemporary art exhibition relates to little in its surroundings nor its own before and after – opting to cement its relevance through simulated individuation and the suspension of an endless present. As a result, it is no surprise that many people find them to be, if not alienating, at least difficult to carry on into their lives.
On and On was a rhizomatic art space made up of circuits of encounter. The vertical-lateral web of the residential building, with its 3 floors, each filled with a series of comparatively small rooms and its narrow stairway that makes a stop at every level but also ascends continuously through the whole house, facilitated a multifarious network of non-hierarchical pathways through the space. To go up also means the visitor will have to go down, and decide when to go left or right, which door handle to turn, where to pause, which corner to explore. The potentialities branched out in many directions, swirling in on themselves.
Each artwork was designated its own room or distinct location within the house – like the balcony or the rooftop. The act of opening the door, of walking into a room, of encountering the art in its own permeable but distinct world, compelled the visitor to give each work time and men- tal space. A sense of discovery was immanent, and the visitor became a more willing recipient to whatever the encounter would bring.
Most of the artworks had a participatory element. Even when no material intervention had taken place, the artworks claimed agency, seeped into the visitor, surrounded them, created conversations through the visitor’s movement and attention. The myth of a pure, monodirectional process of the Spectator taking in the Art was shuttered. The dynamics within the exhibition were transparently re-positioned as a set of mutually affecting relations.
The various art spaces were flooded with people – artists, strangers, friends, curators (the positions bled into each other). The launch of the exhibition/happening diverged from the private view and art show conventions with a set of spontaneously occurring performances and a sinuous schedule which asserted itself conditionally, moment to moment. Analogously, the space was not set up for the types of interactions that occur in a domestic environment.
On and On’s refusal to identify with pre-existing social codes meant the terms of engagement transformed in an autopoietic manner. With familiar behavioral parameters absent and the expectation of networking and flattery dislodged, the encounter between the art, the visitor and the crowd was liberated to all its possible intimacies. Each visitor’s circuit would be their own, not only because the path they choose would be different, but also because it would be shaped by the relations they formed and that formed them along the way.
