Last week, I arranged a casual interview with the artist. After the discussion, we have decided to narrow down the current curatorial focus to poor image, a substandard replica in the cyberspace coined by German filmmaker Hito Steyerl. “The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard (Steyerl, 2013, p.101).” The definition given by Steyerl indicates its contradicted character with the HD image, which is also the dominant type in the typical photography exhibition.
Figure 1. Chat history with the artist.
To present an image that defies the conventional display setting in the white box, an alternative narrative is required through strategic arrangements and composition of exhibition elements. The article Exhibition as Film written by Mieke Bal has provided insights into the installation and layout design. As the title indicates, Bal uses the analogy of film to describe the narration of the exhibition (Bal, 2007). She uses the exhibition Partners (2003) curated by Ydessa Hendeles as an example, pointing out its “overarching model of cinema (Bal, 2007, p.78)” by referencing its cinematic strategies adopted in the storytelling of onsite display.
Figure 2. The floor plan of the exhibition Partners (2003). Image from the article Exhibition as Film.
According to Bal, cinema is “meta-photography (Bal, 2007, p.78)”. This linkage between photography and filmic language was also analyzed by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida when developing his famous notion of “the punctum and the studium”. In Barthes’ discourse, the punctum possesses the ability for the image to “bruise (Barthes, 2020, p.33)” the viewer, which is contrary to the nonchalance and indifference produced by the studium . For Barthes, the moving images of cinema also lack the pensive effect generated by the punctum, in which he found himself being “constrained to a continuous voracity (Barthes, 2020, p.67)”. Philosopher Han-Byung Chul further relates this lack of profundity in contemporary images by criticizing them to be “admits no narrative tension, nothing ‘dramatic’ in the sense of a novel (Han, B.- Chul, 2015, p.11).” Nevertheless, compared to the black box, the white cube creates a different aura in display. Still, to avoid making it a display room of a pile of copies, the criticism by Han is hard to overlook. Following the instructions from Bal, creating an appealing and convincing narrative to revelatory thoughts and reflections will be my goal to process the work.
(words: 348)
Reference:
Bal, M. (2007) “Exhibition as Film,” in Exhibition Experiments. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. pp. 71–93.
Barthes, R. (2020) Camera lucida : reflections on photography / Roland Barthes ; translated from the French by Richard Howard.London: Vintage Classics. pp.31-34.
Barthes, R. (2020) Camera lucida : reflections on photography / Roland Barthes ; translated from the French by Richard Howard.London: Vintage Classics. pp.66-67.
Han, B.-Chul. (2015) ‘The Society of Exhibition’, THE TRANSPARENCY SOCIETY. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, pp. 11.
Partners (2003) [Exhibition]. Haus der Kunst, Munich, Munich, Germany.
Steyerl, H. (2013) In defence of the poor image. Konteksty. 67 (3), 101–105.
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