Interpreting , reinterpreting works from the collection

The Gallery’s A, D and E rooms present a mise en abyme of the interpretive act by way of three exhibitions and three interpretive approaches to a single body of artworks from the Gallery’s collection. This part of the exhibition consists of an experiment that seeks to explore the effects of various formal and semantic associations, exhibition modes and spaces, and diverse educational approaches on the interpretation of the exhibited works. The three sections comprising this part make it possible to follow the interpretive work carried out by exhibition makers and the main issues involved in the process, i.e. the coherence and intelligibility of the works. The display foregrounds the recurrent concerns of many exhibition curators, which are rarely addressed directly: What are the effects of interpreting a work? At what point does interpretation become an over-interpretation or misinterpretation? Is it possible to avoid the instrumentalization of the work? This case study explores the shifting boundaries between the appropriate and the inappropriate in order to develop a balanced discourse between the artists’ intentions and curatorial interventions.

Interpreting, misinterpreting, over-interpreting, under-interpreting

The three sections that make up this project constitute more or less independent exhibitions. They reposition the same body of works throughout the rooms according to different criteria and intentions that, on the one hand, reveal the common threads uniting the works, and on the other, provide factual information which is essential to the interpretation of any work.

1/   Appropriation – History – Past
The first section proposes an evaluation of the relationship between an artist or his/her work and various types of histories, writ small and personal or writ large and collective. The aim is to determine if certain interpretations of works or historical events—included by way of the appropriative practices embedded in the works—can become strategies allowing artists to inscribe themselves in the context of historical narratives. This spatial display contains documents evoking the production context of the works and providing information relating to the approach and intentions of the artists. This section employs an historicist approach to the works in order to consider specific modes in which the figure of the artist can be likened to an historian.

Curatorial intentions

This exploratory project is driven by the desire to examine the coherence of a series of recent Gallery acquisitions following a selection and acquisition process in which I actively participated. This, a priori, personal examination of my own subjectivity, which echoes this selection of works, appeared to have attained universal importance when I reflected on the ways in which many institutions— starting with the Gallery—have proceeded to publicly present acquisitions in their exhibition history. The laudatory nature of such exhibitionary manifestations, which are rarely guided by a precise angle of inquiry, often limits them to a demonstration of a collection’s riches, the acuity of a curator judgement or the generosity of its donors. These reflections led me to this project of renewing the presentation mode of an institution’s recent acquisitions by eliminating celebratory tendencies, which have frequently characterized this type of intervention over the years.

Interpreting, reinterpreting the reverse side of works from the collection

In the Gallery’s B and C rooms is a new project by Paul Litherland, as well as an intervention by the curator that guides and diverts the project’s interpretation. The mode of display evokes a discussion during which the artist stated that he had abandoned a project of photographing the reverse side of works, a process that led him to take an interest in their potential narratives, after having learned that Philippe Gronon and Vik Muniz had already explored this idea in their work. Litherland finally agreed to photograph the reverse side of works from the Gallery’s collection, brought together in the series B-Side, to materially embody these questions about our relationship to the new and exclusive, the circulation and exhaustion of artworks and artistic approaches.

Doing it again, differently

Speculations. Risquer l’interprétation, in turn, echoes the Gallery’s exhibition history, since most of the works from the collection it brings together have already been exhibited. It also has a certain spirit of kinship with the projects of other curators, such as As Much As Possible Given The Time and Space Alloted by Rebecca Duclos and David K. Ross, who reflected on the role of the curator and the circulation of works in permanent collections, and Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la mélancolie, of which it extends references to appropriation and from which it borrows furniture components.

Text: Mélanie Rainville
Translation: Bernard Schütze

Produced with the support of the Frederick and Mary Kay Lowy Art Education Fund.