Exhibition in a Box is a collaborative project centred on the
notion of travel, difference and the
testing of artistic and cultural boundaries. The limitation of form and space
necessitated by the physical restrictions of the specially designed box permit
a rethinking of the relationship between form and content. Participating
artists are required to embrace processes of replication and reproduction,
working to re-consider the physical dimensions of the work whilst retaining an
element of authenticity in respect of the drivers of divergent practices.
In coming to terms with what appears an
artificially imposed restriction, the exhibiting artists will provide a
shifting commentary on the historical function of boxes within practice, where
the box has been put to work for the purpose of entertainment, ideological
critique, aesthetic refinement, as a challenge to the free-market system of
exchange and as evidence of a need for spectacle and division.
The box, as a container and vehicle for the storage and transportation of
objects, has in a broad sense been symbolic of civilisation’s tendency to
separate and protect, and more specifically of the desire to preserve that
which is useful and precious from the natural and decaying order of things.
From the ancient library of Alexandria to Renaissance cabinets of curiosities
(the precursors to modern museums), boxing artefacts and objects of artistic
and religious significance has paralleled the creation and development of the
objects themselves, with an object’s aura becoming in effect extended through
confinement and travel.
That which the box contains becomes evidence both of the journey taken and of
the value placed on that journey and its possible outcomes. In short, and in
terms of the exhibition of material artworks and artefacts, the box acts to
foreground and legitimate the notion of cultural exchange, supporting an idea
of rooted, localised meaning in an age of pluralism, globalisation and an
apparent dissolution of differences. In representing an artist, a place, an
intention or practice, the art object in transit stands for the conditions of
its making, which through cultural displacement foregrounds difference as it
attains specificity.
Exhibitions are by their nature temporary, and many complete extended tours.
However, in highlighting the importance of the box out of which the
exhibits spring, Exhibition in a Box draws from the history of
the travelling show: from European carnivals and circuses to Victorian and
Edwardian Variety and Music Hall entertainers. Such public performances rested
in large part on the means and methods of transit. The efficient boxing of
props, instruments and costumes not only facilitated a smooth transition from
one performance/location to the next but also allowed performers to secure an
interconnected web of venues and locations to move on to, which in turn
legitimated and extended the reach of their art form.
Within twentieth century artistic practice the box has served a variety of
purposes. In Box in a Valise (c.1935-41), Marcel Duchamp
replicated the contents of his life’s work in miniature, offering a portable
museum as a work in itself, though one whose replicated form critiqued the idea
of authenticity. With it, Duchamp extended Dada’s distain for order through an
ironic commentary on the myth of completeness (and of the canon) offered by the
processes of cataloguing and the re-presentation of a body of work.
In the 1960s George Maciunis developed Duchamp’s idea, gathering objects,
readymades, memorabilia and other material artefacts from fellow
artist-collaborators, including Yoko Ono and Christo, and assembling Fluxus
boxes and Flux-kits. In producing intermedia objects Fluxus sought to dissolve
modernist boundaries between high art and kitsch, to fracture the idea of
completeness and to challenge the privileging of media-specificity, which in
turn supported systems of commodification and exchange. The box humorously took
the form of an item purchased; yet more accurately referenced a gift or
present. To the Fluxus project as a whole, and in the spirit of Walter
Benjamin, reproduction offered, if briefly, a form of escape from the
immobilising limitation of the market and the capitalist ideologies that were
seen to underpin it.
American sculptor Donald Judd developed the box as a symbol/object of
completeness. The sheer accessibility of the box, its structural rigour and
familiarity appeared as a bulwark against complexity, artifice and learned and
extraneous artistic devices that Minimalist artists grew to despise. The box
served, in its emptiness, as an end point for formalist development, utilising
formalist restriction to both negate and transcend it. The hope of such a
distillation was, perhaps contradictorily, to blur distinctions between art and
life in an attempt to erect a democratic edifice built of a non-hierarchical
relationship between object and subject. Though Judd’s work travelled, the
sheer uncompromising clarity of the forms negated the need for content (or for
that matter, dialogue) in the traditional sense. Judd’s boxes are neither full
nor empty, filled or emptied—they simply are and were.
Amongst contemporary practitioners, Damien Hirst can be seen, to some extent,
to have returned the box to its early devotional function as a container of
exotica, relics or religious icons. Hirst’s vitrines, whilst providing a visual
reference to Minimalist boxes, in fact continue a lineage of separation and
spectacle dating back to the Middle Ages. Here, the box silences its contents
in the hope of replicating the Byzantine altarpiece, whose heavy wooden
framework limited the possibility of contamination from the world outside when
engaged in acts of pious contemplation.
Today, the box is as ubiquitous as ever; yet its
role has become less clear against the backdrop of a host of cultural,
aesthetic and ideological presuppositions. At its most reduced the box acts as
a mere solution to the transportation of goods, at a speed determined by the
technological norms of the day. Yet this provides evidence of a continued
desire for art works to travel, perhaps in order to take their localised
meanings elsewhere or to test themselves in alien climates and return changed.
The supporting systems of exchange remain.
Tom Palin, 2015
Exhibition in a Box is a collaborative project centred on the notion of travel, difference and the testing of artistic and cultural boundaries. The limitation of form and space necessitated by the physical restrictions of the specially designed box permit a rethinking of the relationship between form and content. Participating artists are required to embrace processes of replication and reproduction, working to re-consider the physical dimensions of the work whilst retaining an element of authenticity in respect of the drivers of divergent practices.
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