Past Exhibition

Out of a Suitcase

View: Out of a Suitcase

Suggesting that the show reflects the times risks turning attention away from the individual works to focus on the exhibition itself. This polarity is inherent in any curatorial premise, where artworks are used to lend credence to a catch-all ideal. Yet this group show did not really have a designated curator. What it had was a designated courier. The absence of a unifying theme leaves the most transparent lens through which to experience these works, and in turn to appreciate how contemporary a phenomenon their coming together really is. Again, here scale greases the wheels. The exhibit’s organization, while not exactly stress free, progressed less burdened than is usual by the limitations of the physical. Hurtles such as transport costs, insurance and the sluggishness with which larger objects move through channels were simply side stepped. Communication was almost exclusively by email. Traveling light allowed the manner of this show, the flavor of its inception and coalescence, to mime somewhat the improvised culture of the web, and the web appears to be good for the art community. Shared media have an homogenizing effect on collective preoccupations but don’t necessarily promote commonly held assumptions. The distributed networks afforded by technology encourage a tendency toward granularity of perspective, thus nurturing the cult of the individual, and along with that, the rarified brand of consideration enjoyed by art.