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...
A critical revue of contemporary art in the city.