displays - franck leibovici

on dis­plays
as soon as they work with pre-existing doc­u­ments (still or moving image, texts or sound), poets and artists, cura­tors and scenog­ra­phers, graphic designers and exhi­bi­tion archi­tects, always find on their path the ques­tion of dis­play. because a work of art is defined through its showing con­di­tions, through its methods of pub­li­ciza­tion: a work is never per­ceived without a point of view or out of any point of view. no art­work but through sites... as well as for the "white cube": a white room, an empty space, a pedestal, sep­a­ra­tion spaces, 40 lux lighting. in fact, the same ques­tion is found in many other dis­ci­plines, since sci­en­tists too must invent image-pro­cessing tech­niques, as well as police offi­cers, doc­tors, and so on.

in the late 90s, poet christophe hanna had pub­lished a poster enti­tled "our organs are our the­o­ries". the for­mula could be applied here: "our dis­plays are our the­o­ries", because each dis­play encap­su­lates a the­o­ret­ical model. as soon as we look more closely, the dis­plays con­tra­dict the mod­ernist con­cep­tion of an inde­pen­dent work of art, to which infor­ma­tive doc­u­ments would be added. because each dis­play car­ries with it the ques­tion of medi­a­tion. and if a doc­u­ment is not only a sup­port for infor­ma­tion, but is a script, a score con­taining actors and actions to be acti­vated, to be per­formed, then we must nec­es­sarily change the way we think about what an exhi­bi­tion is, and thereon, change its param­e­ters and for­mats.

"per­forming doc­u­ments" implies imme­di­ately placing one­self in rela­tion to action, in rela­tion to exer­cise, to repeated training, and an exhi­bi­tion is then no longer either a place of cel­e­bra­tion of sta­bi­lized arti­facts or a place where doc­u­ments are dis­played under cases (in line with the expected format that many doc­u­men­tary and archival exhi­bi­tions take). the exhi­bi­tion becomes, on the con­trary, a place where one trains one­self to acti­vate new ecolo­gies obtained by the com­po­si­tion of the assem­bled works and doc­u­ments. these exhi­bi­tions could be called exhi­bi­tion-train­ings, in which the dis­play takes the place of weight training benches or yoga mats. this also implies that these dis­plays can inhabit dif­ferent forms, including that of a book, or a manual.
the con­cept devel­oped here aims to "dis­ob­jec­tify" art­works, or rather to revive what is meant by "object" by reassem­bling the latter with ele­ments that were con­sid­ered as being external to it, by once again high­lighting rela­tions that are essen­tial to its oper­a­tion but which have been removed from the base of the sculp­ture to have you believe that the sculp­ture spoke for itself.

a dis­play is ulti­mately only a way to per­form the medi­a­tion and rela­tion­ships con­tained in an art­work, a way to actu­alize the poten­tial­i­ties of the latter. in this, the dis­play is an exten­sion of the exhib­ited work and this exten­sion still car­ries a body of people nec­es­sary for its pro­duc­tion and its main­te­nance, ie, a col­lec­tive.

franck lei­bovici