If you have the misfortune of reading these posts regularly, you may have noticed the frequency with which I refer to propism , a term I do not think I have ever defined. The following is a deliberately crude and short essay that sets out to do so. As the “prop” in the term would indicate, this revolves around notions borrowed from the logic of the theatrical medium. Anthropomorphism Probably the most canonical discussion of theatricality in visual art comes from Michael Fried. 1967’s still highly controversial “Art and Objecthood” sought to delineate what he took to be two warring sensibilities, one that he associated with Modernist painting and sculpture and the other with the grey area between art and non-art that he associated with literalist (or more commonly termed Minimalist) art. He took literalism as defining itself as a position taken against Modernism. At bottom, this was a war of sensibilities and experience more than one of any deep ideological convictions. It was an op...
Previously, I have discussed my reservations around the employment of the role of “narrative” in exhibitions. Specifically, this involves the lack of clarity in how this notion translates to the visual display of work and how interaction with the work actually operates. Unless you stretch the term to its breaking point, very little in the practical visual logic of most exhibitions has any strong narrative content. This just seems like an unnaturally appended term to appeal to concepts that can then (presumably) be projected onto the work when it is not clearly evident. As such, it allows for the set-up of a fantasy of relations that the material reality of the work demonstrates to be absent. As a strategy, it is a way of trying to smuggle things in without doing the work that would make them sensible as visual art (if they can even make sense that way). So, an appeal to narrative is primarily an authoritarian device of enframing, something that tends to be the reserve of curatin...