Exhibitions of an Exhibition at Casey Kaplan
Eduardo Costa
Curator Jens Hoffmann recently presented his show of art works and curator’s
proposals, Exhibitions of an Exhibition. Hoffman invited artists Meschac Gaba,
Simryn Gill, Joseph Grigely and Amy Vogel, Roni Horn, Brian Jungen, Marepe, and
Rosemary Trockel to show works he had been interested in for some time, or he
had just discovered. He also invited curators Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy, Raimundas
Malasauskas, Tumelo Mosaka, and Allison Peters to submit texts explaining their
perceptions of the relationships among the artworks he had selected.
As I read these texts, it was clear that by hanging them in the gallery the authors
were in effect curating their own shows. Some proposals went beyond what Hoffmann
requested, offering original and ground-breaking exhibitions. Curator Raimundas
Malasauskas, for instance, proposed to displace the basic show across the Hudson
River to New Jersey (the Casey Kaplan gallery is in the meatpacking district,
near the Hudson), where many artists live but where few exhibitions take place.
After focusing for some time on the works on Kaplan’s concrete floors and
well plastered walls I decided to go — without exiting the gallery —
to New Jersey, and see the show there as suggested by Malasauskas. In Jersey
the works acquired a whole new significance. Forms, concepts and colors were
successfully reformulated in the new context. Somehow the act of imagining the
room, and myself in it, transposed to the other shore had a surprisingly strong
effect on my experience of the show. Malasauskas has taken conceptual curating
to an arena where it successfully blends with conceptual art, creating a new
subspecies of exhibition.
A shift in context by means of an intellectual effort was also crucial to the
proposal by curator Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy. She suggested presenting
the art works between the lines on pages 314-326 of Blindness by José
Saramago. The Portuguese Nobel Prize winner’s fiction, reprinted in English translation
in Hernandez’s text, was the venue this time. Saramago’s text is about
seeing and not seeing, and there are references to art and galleries. When I
started to mentally position the works at the Kaplan gallery between Saramago’s
lines I felt happy and fulfilled. The show was beautiful, my reservations about
the actual art content in some of the works were alleviated, and I accepted the
whole show as a fulfilling experience. Hernandez may well be the happy inventor
of the literary venue.
Curators Tumelo Musaka and Allison Peters presented interesting, if less radical
proposals. In all, Hoffmann’s formula is definitely promising. It has taken
more than thirty years for some of the art lessons in Art in the Mind, a catalogue
exhibition curated by Athena Spear at Oberlin College in 1970, to influence the
practice of curating to this extent. If it isn’t overdone, this new aesthetics
of the curatorial may yet blow a refreshing breeze through the art world.
