Artists: BGL, Conrad Bakker, Beth Campbell, Germaine Koh, Valerie Hegarty, Isola and Norzi, Chadwick Rantanen, Derek Sullivan, Anne Walsh/Chris Kubick, Lee Walton, Laurel Woodcock

The artists and organizers of every gallery exhibition offer a response to the questions "why does the gallery exist?" and "what is an exhibition good for?" Whether intended as a statement of critical self-reflexivity or a response implicit in the continued use of forms that have become the default, all institutional productions operate within an encapsulated history and logic. The hierarchy of an institutional bureaucracy, the raw materials of the physical architecture, and the modes of social exchange occuring within the boundaries of a gallery--and its child the exhibition--accumulate to form a language that is spoken by galleries around the world. While it is unclear how much of an effect a fluency in this language has on the production of artworks for public exhibition, it is apparent that a gallery can inflect the art it presents as much as the art determines the form of presentation in the gallery.

Through years of experimentation, agents of culture have repeatedly tested the conceptual and physical limits of the gallery through exhibition. As a result of this gallery-as-laboratory activity, the language of exhibition has been expanded to the very threshold of its capacity. Yet, despite the excesses of pluralism in art, the gallery and the exhibition have developed a set of stable signifiers: lighting track, white walls, a front desk, a gallery attendant, etc. While these fundamental structures of meaning differ slightly from gallery to gallery (and from gallery to museum to alternative space), they can be said to accumulate as a set of expectations in the viewer/user. Once the particular dialect and idioms are identified in a given environment, this root language can be employed to construct context-contingent meaning and to support or undermine the expectations harbored by the audience.

Artist Michael Asher, who has become well known for employing this kind of context-contingent meaning, uses the term "Situational Aesthetics" to describe "an aesthetic system that juxtaposes predetermined elements occurring within the institutional framework. They are recognizable and identifiable to the public because they are drawn from the institutional context itself." In other words, Asher acknowledges certain elements of the gallery or museum are known quantities despite their background/neutral status. Through combination, relocation, or removal, the value of these elements can change, making us aware of their capacity to hold meaning. Thus, context-contingent meaning arises out of a complex set of relationships between the gallery, its history, and the expectations of the viewer/user.

On Being an Exhibition borrows Michael Asher's thinking as a point of departure toward the development of an exhibition that leverages the pre-conditioning of the viewer, the physical language of the gallery, and the packaging and promotion of its contents. While the exhibition does not seek to locate these practices in relation to a specific genre of art, it proposes a continued support of the infiltration of creative thinking into all corners of the institution and the re-identification of these larger practices as not limited to the strategies of institutional critique and site specificity.

Download the exhibition catalog (pdf).

View Additional Images from the exhibition