Group Show: Advancing Specifically to Get Lost

Although the title of the exhibition is a slight variation on a phrase found near the beginning of Robert Smithson's famous essay "A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art," I had a different text in mind when I began to think about it. In 1972, as his contribution to the exhibition Documents, Smithson wrote "Cultural Confinement."¹ The essay is an acid pour on the exhibition and its curator—on exhibitions and curators in general. It's a salvo against the desire to bracket art objects from the vital dynamics of the world by housing them in wards and cells (galleries). "Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of esthetic convalescence. They are looked upon as so many inanimate invalids, waiting for critics to pronounce them curable or incurable."

Ex.1: Pierre Huyghe's wind chime on Granny's porch, playing the music of a cold front coming down from Georgia, a music that every now and then sounds like the haunting theme song from Encounters of the Third Kind.

Instead of static objects ensconced in the faked neutrality of the gallery, Smithson is "for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation." He wants to work dialectically, enacting a rigorous give-and-take with what the world, an indefatigable Deleuzean production machine, continually brings forth. "I am talking about a dialectic of nature that interacts with the physical contradictions inherent in natural forces as they are—nature as both sunny and stormy."

I was thinking of something possibly stranger than what Smithson has in mind: namely, objects that don't just engage the non-linear sprawl of the world, but grow lost in it, surrendering their symbolic function. It's almost as if they have been infused, at the point of production, with a desire to renounce their status as art objects altogether. It's a surrender of identity rather than just an amorphousness of form. Whether it's Jorge Pardo's lamp or Jason Dodge's poster, these objects gamble with the possibility that they may get lost among other objects that look and function the same way that they do.

It's as if they're taking the ready-made's route but in the wrong direction: Instead of being everyday things that are "elevated" by being placed in an art context, these are manufactured art objects that may be "leveled" into everyday things by being placed in certain ideal situations.

Ex.2: Thomas Bayrle's Portikus exhibition certificate, like some lost and doodled-on document, pinned to the door of an employees' locker room, next to the calendar from the auto parts store that has Miss June revving up the libidos in the room. Miss June's sweet signature has been rendered, like Dr. Birnbaum's, in a rector's stern cursive.

But I know I'm dealing in fantasy here: such ideal situations will never come to pass. These art objects, while driven by an impulse to grow lost in the thick of things, never will. Money, context, tradition, etc.—all stand in the way. Knowing that they can never really fulfill what they propose as their natural destiny, I tried to make the exhibition a kind of Fantasy Island by organizing it as a series of scenarios that point to ways in which these objects may, if some different arrangement of the world were available, be set adrift by the riptides of the quotidian. That is, I tried to play these aching-to-be-mundane things against the harsh grain of the reality that has been assigned to them.

1 Smithson, Robert. "Cultural Confinement," Artforum, v. 11, no. 2 (October 1972).

GEAN MORENO is a Miami-based artist. His texts have appeared in various magazines and catalogs, most recently in Uncertain States of America! (Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo).