The Exhibition as Cosmogram

Abstract

This essay proposes to look at the art exhibition as a model of the world as it appears to itself. If a cosmology depicts how a certain culture perceives the universe, a cosmogram provides a diagrammatic illustration of that universe. Locating the exhibition format within the history of ideas, this essay suggests the contemporary art exhibition as a form that reflects and demonstrates the world today. By looking at the contemporary art exhibition’s historical background, and evaluating its implicit and explicit conceptions, its operations, functions, ideology and beliefs, this essay focuses on the deployment and arrangement of temporary constellations of artefacts along alignments of intensity and distribution. To this curatorial gesture of difference and connectedness which informs contemporary art curating, we can call metastabele (metastability is defined in thermodynamics as a relation of high energy that is minimized to specific locations of “many-body assemblies,” on the verge of collapse). This high energy is located in the contact points between the elements). The exhibition as a cosmogram makes attainable the intricate structure of metastable relations which inform the structural conditions through which meaning is organized. The art exhibition performs the underlying logic of finance, cloud computing, supply chains, public health, the biosphere, and other somewhat balanced systems that are structurally unstable, on the verge of collapse, making it a cosmogram of our world.

Keywords

• constellation
• demonstration
• finance
• mesoscopic
• metastability