Kipnis and the Decentralized Object

Jeffery Kipnis, in his frustrated letter/essay Who’s Afraid of Gift-Wrapped Kazoos? writes, “An essay or book can earn the undivided attention of the reader for tens of hours, thus, the writer has ample time to unfold the scholarship, the considered argument, the conjecture of the story, in complex invention or in similar detail.” In his letter the audience attends the exhibition only to “gossip”, “pontificate”, and “opine” as they “breeze through it without the slightest interest in or even awareness of the sacrifice” made by the curator. He presents this as a kind of generally understood reality of the exhibition experience.

“I believe that the irreducible, irreproducible effects, the pleasures, the powers, and the possibilities of an exhibition actually obtain from its evanescence… I wanted something that requires even a lighter touch than live theater, because I wanted to put king and company and things all on stage as characters in an unscripted play, without them even knowing it; and to score it with the silent soundtrack that only an exhibition produces. The exhibition is the only kind of theater in which actor, audience, prop, lighting, orchestra, even the stage itself are on stage all at the same time, and none quite knows which role it plays when” (emphasis mine).

Kipnis points to an example of this theater when describing Terry Riley’s lecture on museum architecture, “Making it a point that, although he knows little about Hellenistic art and therefore the actual merits of the sculpture, the melodramatic staging of the piece by the architecture produces the inescapable effect of assuring him—and most everyone else—that it is the most important of masterpieces.”

All of this posits an increasingly decentralized role of the “art object itself” as an ideal experience of an exhibition. All of this happens, too, without knowing and without being taught. Kipnis warns his reader about the dangers of teaching, knowing, getting it, while paradoxically admitting that neither of these things is a threat. He writes, “Exhibitions don’t teach if for no other reason than they don’t have time to.” Despite the warnings against teaching, this assertion feels bleak. The most in-depth, dedicated, rewarding engagement takes place for an audience when reading the aforementioned essays, books, or other scholarship; and when paired strategically with a specific architecture.

What strategies can artists apply to address the decentralization of the object within the bleak evanescent exhibition experience? I intend this to be an open-ended question/proposal. Neither is the question meant to be an indictment of the importance didactics or architecture. The responsibility of engendering a productive art experience lies in the hands of all the “actors”. In this essay, the curator succeeds when being especially sensitive to, and exhibiting an amount (however small or large) of control in setting this stage, its direction. For the artist it seems there could be an equal amount of anticipation, control, and “virtuosity”, only repositioned in the constellation of elements surrounding an exhibition and its “intention”.