The exhibition process for curarequito required that the artists and curators produce the works in situ; the curators did not secure old works or commission the artists to produce new work in the usual way: the objects did not exist prior to installation. This process provoked with some urgency the question, what is an exhibition. Our experience, informed by readings of Maurice Blanchot, George Bataille and Jean-Luc Nancy (all quotes in this essay are from Jean-Luc Nancy), provided us with some answers to the peculiar situation that is an exhibition: an offering to the gaze, an opportunity for exchange, a possibility for community. The revelation of a paradoxical space. These were the principles that guided our practice as curators-artists-spectators.

"Presence itself is disposition, the spacing of singularities." Of course, artistic expressions differ in terms of materials, concepts, and intentions. However, to ensure maximum freedom of expression, to encourage difference, the exhibition was organized around a motif and not a theme, which would have constrained the artists to fit their works into categories that had already been decided. A motif is more flexible than a theme. A theme is expressed through exposition and illustration; it is a singularity that refuses plurality. The works link to the theme as illustrations or examples of this theme. But a motif works differently, by presentation; the works are presences, which form strong and weak bonds with each other through contrast, mirroring, reverberation, and contradiction. In this way, the motif is open to the plurality that makes up a community, including positions of alterity.

The theme tends to level and even erase difference and to privilege a similarity of purpose, which it forces onto the reception of the works. For example, an exhibition whose theme is ‘portraitureí­ brings together portraits and portraits only. The viewerí­s intellectual position is restricted to the recognition of an all-encompassing theme. A narrow, conceptual frame for understanding the works is created, akin to the fixed mechanism of serial meaning production against which Deleuze proposed the idea of rhizomic creation. To continue with our example, an exhibition with a motif such as ‘figuresí­ would favour a plurality of expressions and the abstraction of multiple meanings, a connotative rather than a denotative approach. More demanding for everyone, but at the same time potentially richer. For these reasons we decided to work with the ‘spectralí­ and not ‘the ghostí­ as our organizing idea: the spectral understood as offering multiple ways of apprehending an artwork at the same moment, an absent presence, which is simultaneously the presence of its absence, a temporal fold of the past into the present, a cultural construction, obsessive retinal image, fantasy, rumour...

Art making

Artworks escape definition other than their being an unavoidable presence, offering but eluding all possibility of the community, by their immanence and transcendence. This is the drama on which artistic (and curatorial) activities are based. The artwork is what is. The artwork is firstly defined by its being. "The essence of Being is the shock of the instant. Each time. ‘Beingí­ is always an instant of Being: (a lash, a blow, beating, shock, knock, an encounter, an access). As a result, it is also always an instance ‘withí­: singulars singularly together, where the togetherness is neither the sum, nor the incorporation, nor the ‘society,í­ nor the ‘communityí­." The artwork tends to merge into the collective, but remains centered on its own alterity. I cannot possess an artwork, I can only be haunted, possessed, by an artwork. I can only welcome the alterity of the artwork in my individuality. This is why the understanding of an artwork is an uncertain movement that always leads towards rupture. "It never ceases to be an intrusion: that is to say, it is always without the right to be there; it never becomes familiar, one never becomes accustomed to it. On the contrary, it is always a disturbance, discordance in the midst of intimacy. This is what must be thought, and therefore practiced. If not, the strangeness of the stranger is reabsorbed before he has passed the threshold." The task of the curator is to create a rhythmic equilibrium between these alterities, the artworks, in the spectacular strangeness that is an exhibition.