Exhibition as a Philosophical Problem

We have been very lucky to develop the intercalations: paginated exhibition series with a grant from the Schering Stiftung that allowed us to experiment with the book as a site for making exhibitions. Throughout the series of six—the last two are set for publication in Spring 2018—we accept the format of the codex while also attempting to experiment with adjacencies, rhythms, and relations among different regimes of knowledge that are normally in quite distant orbits. So, the exhibition mode is really about an ecology of attention that pulls and plys a theme but does not resolve into a linear narrative sequence. They are not chapters in an edited volume, but commissions, conversations, and provocations that can  stand alone, but which, when read together, in any order, produce different, uncanny images. In the fourth volume, for example, we tried to do this with the forest; the forest is a vast topic that intersects any number of disciplines and fields, but we wanted to move through these as  one moves in a forest. Not as a metaphor, but conceptually; not in an impressionistic way but to relay the affects of the forest in a way that is resonant and familiar, yet dis-located to the codex. These books have all taken years of research to be produced as we try to make a space for our various contributors and interlocutors to say/do/make things that they wouldn’t try in another space. In this sense, it is also an exhibition for disinhibiting friends and colleagues and collaborators. We are trying to conspire for ways to think and work otherwise, always with the conceptual and material horizon of the Anthropocene as a backdrop to these works.
   
When we were trying to describe our process with respect to more traditional exhibition making—that is, in an exhibition space, not through a book—Hammad Nasar’s reference to an “exhibition-led” process of research seemed to bring into focus the way we were pursuing our work in that moment, and this is especially the case of projects like “Minor Ornithology” and “Reassembling the Natural.”¹ For the latter, we have spent over four years working with dozens of collaborators, institutions, collections, funding agencies, and NGOs doing their own primary research, not to mention residencies, workshops, etc., so it is really an immersive process that the exhibition (or, in this case, five or more exhibitions) facilitate. So, we believe the exhibition “leads” in our “exhibition-led inquiry” because during the process we play close, continual attention to how we can bring the insights and elements of the work, whether field research, ethnography, collections and archival research, or interviews and collaborations, into the space of the exhibition. Which is to say: toward a public or publics in the context of a spatial realization of research on a topic or theme. In the case of “Reassembling the Natural.”¹ we have been working on the meaning of natural history collections in the context of mass extinction and climate change (and, of course, the Anthropocene), so there is a tremendous range of sites and concerns; but, we are always thinking alongside the problem of presentation. How to present and disseminate this knowledge as a way of co-producing it? Exhibition is thus a philosophical problem that travels along with the thematic or conceptual research we do; what, when, and how to exhibit a given set of concerns or ways of working, of various epistemological trajectories or commitments, of intersecting or interfering versions of a given narrative? All of this provokes a persistent rhythm that drives and animates research; not that we only work through exhibition, of course we make books and workshops and lectures too. And, because of that, we are able to be quite precise about the composition of elements of a given work, although there is never an a priori formula for which aspect of research goes into which format of dissemination. We approach exhibitions, like any other philosophical problem, as a way of interfacing with what we don’t yet know how to present, but that we nevertheless feel requires a form for exposition.