On drumming an exhibition

Some thoughts on percussion as a model, a la Anthony Huberman

Image description: Two hands emerge from the upper edge of the frame, using a pencil to mark the corner of a photograph, one of several unframed photographs spread across a wooden floor. Here, we see an artist assist in the install of another artist’s work, during the installation of To Weave Blue at the Fogelman Galleries at The University of Memphis in February 2020.

Last week at the Cooper Union’s Intra-Disciplinary lecture series (absolutely one of my favorite things happening on the Internet these days), curator Anthony Huberman gave a talk about an exhibition as percussion. Huberman is director at The Wattis Institute and, more particularly, his talk was about a three-part series of exhibitions he is currently working on, titled Drum Listens to Heart. “I want to talk about art and politics, using a music vocabulary,” Huberman said, before going on to talk about art that not only references percussion and drumming ensembles, but more especially thinks about the abundant metaphors and experiences that rhythm allows within visual art and exhibition making.

I will not paraphrase Huberman’s exhibition ideas, though I will say that I hope to travel to LA for all three parts, I was so brightened by his talk. But here, I want to think about what he had to say about ensemble as a method for making exhibitions.

The last exhibition I curated before the Covid-19 pandemic shutdowns in the U.S. took effect was an exhibition called To Weave Blue: poema al tejido. The show centered Maya voices and cosmovision, through poetry and weaving. And, in particular, I wanted to think of the exhibition as a poem itself. To Weave Blue, in my mind, was a poem dedicated to weaving. There were poets included in the exhibition, including a recording of poet Negma Coy reading her poem Peraj taq sipanïk (Canvases of our inheritance) in Kaqchikel. Her voice floated through the gallery space as a cipher for what poetry does, how it moves, and what it allows. Similarly, I thought, an exhibition could take on those qualities: the layering of voices and visions without didactic extrapolation; the pauses between phrases—open space for the viewer to breathe before moving to another object; the relationship to memory and remembrance, as if through a fogged glass or heard in the faint memory of a song. I’m still thinking through what an exhibition-as-a-poem might look, sound, and feel like. In Huberman’s exploration of percussion, I found an interesting analog, a similar pushing against the walls of exhibitionary traditions by questioning the very form itself.

Huberman described some ways that music is embodied experience: “Music passes through the body before it reaches the mind,” he says, and (I am paraphrasing from my notes): “Music implicates the body, touches the body; is less a concept that needs decoding than a vibration that needs other vibrations… Ephemeral, intermittent, it carries meaning, it cross-pollinates between sounds, forms of knowledge and subjectivity, histories, and so much more.” Replace the word music with exhibition and we find a compelling re-definition of the form.

Huberman riffs on Fred Moten’s writing about ensemble as a space where things overlap, of generative and collective becoming, of thinking without a center, the undoing of the ability to locate. Ensemble, Huberman/Moten says: is the totality of an ecosystem. It is everything generated and entangled in a situation.

We might say: Exhibitions are the totality of an ecosystem, everything generated and entangled in a situation.

Huberman describes the artistic act as tearing a hole, or tying a knot. It is fugitive and wily, sitting just outside meaning and, therefore, its existence also sparks the production of meaning-making devices. Think of exhibitions, arts writing, interviews, artist statements, wall texts, handouts—verbiage—as the meaning-making devices that the artwork sparks, even if it resists them, tangles with them, bites them back.

To think of an exhibition in this ensemble way, then, is to choose something other than a meaning-making device for approaching the artwork. Instead, the percussive metaphor is about interpretation and performance, about overlap and finding rhythmic points of contact, about something physical, social, ideological, all together, all at once.

We drum in ritual, in collective gatherings, in celebration. We find the beat of the heart to be percussive, just as we do the ticking of a clock’s second hand. The rhythms of the world are thick around us, sparking our movements, our reactions, our healing, our despair. The percussive, Huberman says, “can illuminate something more precise about how something abstract can illuminate the world.” I am drawn to this intentional opacity, this resistance to explanation in favor of musicality instead. Can an exhibition be percussive? In what ways and in which moments does it ensemble? And how does a rhythmic gathering of objects help us rethink what an exhibition might do? How does the image of a drum circle offer us other models for thinking about the relationships between artists, curators, critics, arts educators, collectors, institutions, and audience?

When you drum with others, you strike a balance between listening and producing sound. Your body moves in tandem with the sound you produce with the drum. You are in a constant state of responsiveness to the sounds others produce. And, together, you create a sound that is only possible in a collective experience, its full richness reliant on the sounds being made by others, simultaneously.

I’ve spoken in recent weeks with several students who are wondering about the value of the open call juried exhibitions that proliferate for emerging artists, in towns everywhere. My students and clients wonder, isn’t this what I need to do, in order to add something to my resume so I can find bigger and better opportunities later? My answer is almost always no. The reason these shows are not especially useful, I think, is that they mostly have no rhythm. They don’t make me want to dance. The pieces are out of sync, defeating each other in their randomness and accumulation, making the opposite of music: these shows feel like imaginative concrete.

Your CV doesn’t matter, really. Putting your works into spaces that allow them to thrum and riff and spark off each other, to respond to other works and other ideas in ways that are perhaps inexplicable yet make you nod your head in syncopated understanding… that’s what an exhibition should do. That’s what I want for your work, always.

warmly,
Laura

Laura August, PhD makes essays and exhibitions, lumpy pots and wild gardens. She has curated more than 20 exhibitions as an independent curator working between the U.S. and Central America. In 2021, she was named an inaugural Mellon Arts + Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, and her writing about contemporary art in Guatemala City has been recognized with an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Alongside her consulting practice for artists and writers, she teaches a process, practice, and professional strategies class for artists at the Glassell School of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She currently makes her home on the edge of the Chihuahua Desert.