I have this idea for a repeated exhibition. The exhibition is made up of the same piece over and over on every wall. When I think of this exhibition, the repeated artwork is usually a drawing, simply because of the labor involved in attempting to recreate multiple identical drawings. I suppose you could achieve this with ceramics or painting or something else that requires the artist’s hand to reproduce. I never think of this show in terms of photography or printmaking though, because of their ease of reproducibility.
In my head, this idea is best exhibited in a large museum that has multiple galleries/rooms in the exhibition space. On every wall of every gallery is the same drawing in the same frame, hung at the same height.
When I think about the exhibition, I’m tempted to curate it differently sometimes, maybe hang the drawings in a big grid in one room, sparse in the next, etc. But I always come back to the same desire for repetition. And while repetition isn’t fully possible because of the restraints of the gallery space, in this exhibition repetition should be sought after as far as it is possible in the artist’s/curator’s control.
This tension between repetition and difference is something that comes up often for me, especially with this exhibition idea. Each time I talk to someone about the idea, they always offer the idea that there should be subtle changes in each drawing; that the drawings should have a different object added or be slightly different sizes in order to have something for visitors to look for (or look at).
But I’m not interested in difference.
I always come back to the pure attempt for repetition. I know repetition isn’t absolutely possible in drawing, which is why I often come back to that as the ideal medium to attempt repetition in.
Time is an essential part of this exhibition. While it may seem on the onset that space is the most important part, due to the focus of a gallery or museum with multiple rooms, this is a false assumption. In this exhibition, space is only there to serve time. The time needed to travel from one room to the next is vital to the audience’s experience. The realization that would come from walking out of one room into the next, only to discover more of the same drawing is what I’m most interested in.
I think about this most often as a form of comedy, attempting to mimic the form of repetitive comedy that I’m such a big fan of. Comedians like Andy Kaufman, Kristen Schaal and Kurt Braunohler, and Bo Burnam have all perfected this form of repetition. They each have bits where repetition is discovered throughout the joke, and each repetition causes a heightened experience.
This exhibition is an attempt to use repetition in that same way, but I’m certain the response wouldn’t be the same. Audiences laugh when it is used as comedy because the audience is prepared to laugh. Artworld audiences aren’t prepared to laugh or have that kind of reaction. I think many viewers of this exhibition would find humor in it, and some may even laugh out loud. But I think many other visitors to the exhibition would be annoyed come room 3 or 4 or 5 after realizing they’re just going to keep seeing the same thing. The general public tends to be much more critical of art than comedy.
You’re probably wondering what this repeated drawing would be. It is, after all, the heart of the exhibition. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure what the drawing is. Sometimes I think it would just be a very banal water scene with a boat, maybe slightly stormy. Other times I think it would be a simple object like a chair. Or maybe it’s a plane in the sky just after takeoff, with some clouds and a slight landscape below. Other moments, I think it would be best as a drawing that uses a lot of repetition within the composition, like a table covered in jars or a tall stack of pillows. I’m almost positive though, that the drawing is representational.