About a week ago, I was invited to participate in a traveling group show with the working title, Suitcase. The opportunity for this exhibition was simple. A visiting German artist was traveling from the San Francisco Bay Area to Tokyo to visit family and friends. The selection was constrained to be able to fit in his checked luggage and to hang comfortably in the intended exhibition space, his Tokyo friend's modest living room. Certain people got word of it and joined in. This much might sum up the whole and I could stop here, except for the serendipitous mirroring of the times brought about by the show's one organizing principle, scale. For practical reasons none of the works of the growing number of participants could measure more than a few inches in any given direction. If there is a shared theme running through this collection, it is most saliently this: the works are unusually small. That this expedient should provide as much cohesion as it does is a real surprise, and a credit to the context for the individual works provided by the exhibit.
Suggesting that the show reflects the times risks turning attention away from the individual works to focus on the exhibition itself. This polarity is inherent in any curatorial premise, where artworks are used to lend credence to a catch-all ideal. Yet this group show did not really have a designated curator. What it had was a designated courier. The absence of a unifying theme leaves the most transparent lens through which to experience these works, and in turn to appreciate how contemporary a phenomenon their coming together really is. Again, here scale greases the wheels. The exhibit's organization, while not exactly stress free, progressed less burdened than is usual by the limitations of the physical. Hurtles such as transport costs, insurance and the sluggishness with which larger objects move through channels were simply side stepped. Communication was almost exclusively by email. Traveling light allowed the manner of this show, the flavor of its inception and coalescence, to mime somewhat the improvised culture of the web, and the web appears to be good for the art community. Shared media have an homogenizing effect on collective preoccupations but don't necessarily promote commonly held assumptions. The distributed networks afforded by technology encourage a tendency toward granularity of perspective, thus nurturing the cult of the individual, and along with that, the rarified brand of consideration enjoyed by art.
One of the contemporary aspects of the suitcase show is the degree to which it anticipates that a large number of people will view the show only through reproduction, in this case online. Few will actually walk through that house in Tokyo. Although the bottom line of a good exhibition is that the work can be seen, curatorial efforts often aim at seeing to it that the work is understood. Hence all the headphones in museums. Historically, the group show has been an effective means for drawing lines in the sand. Artists must grapple with the context within which their work is experienced, as much as with their chosen medium, in order to achieve their objectives. Nonetheless, the artist must start by bringing something to the table, and here the small scale of the works reduces or at least mitigates the disparity between their physical presence and what one may take away from viewing in reproduction.
The suitcase show may continue to improvise, may add other venues, may switch out content, include other artists as it seeks its full capacity. In this fashion it may well actualize the radical definition of the group show, as a model of distributed components, an open architecture best suited to promoting the open ideas, associations and sensations that are the hallmark of any work of art worth waiting for as it comes around on the airport luggage carrousel.
George Lawson
Oakland 9.28.06
