CCS BARD

Exhibited investigated different approaches to making exhibitions, and the ways in which particular exhibition contexts seek to ascribe value, meaning and aura to works. The exhibition took a single work as its focus, Thomas Struth’s work Louvre IV (1989). Louvre IV engages issues of the private and the public, the museum context, and the notion of audience. As a work which itself represents a moment when a certain kind of museum context was created, Louvre IV operated as the main agent of discussion and a negotiator of meanings in the exhibition. The exhibition consisted of six rooms: a room where works are curated on the premise of a visual semblance; an alphabetical room where a segment of the Rivendell Collection was presented in alphabetical order of the artists names; a collector’s room; a Nineteenth Century Salon installation ; a restrained white cube gallery; and finally a contextual room where work was treated as a fact for investigation. Exhibited brought the Rivendell Collection of Late-Twentieth Century Art, modes of exhibition practice and the galleries of the Center for Curatorial Studies into a collision in an effort to “denaturalize” the agreements between works, exhibition spaces, and social, political, and aesthetic contexts.