The Observation Deck: No.7 – Exhibition titles

An ongoing, occasional series cataloguing minor art world epiphenomena.

7. The changing fashions in exhibition titles A small observation, but notable as a sort of sub-corollary of exhibition publicity material. Vast amounts of press information passes through the frieze office on a daily basis, and it’s interesting to note how bigger patterns start to emerge. Exhibition titles have always been about positioning a show – a title is an indication of mood, a clue to the work’s form or conceptual underpinning. However, what is curious about observing exhibition titles in the present, radically expanded, art world, is the uniformity of types and the frequency with which they occur, and thus the extent to which this ‘positioning’ becomes less to do with a title being the honest-to-god, best way of summing up the contents of the show, and more a way of signposting that the show belongs to a certain subgenre of artistic sensibility. Here are three popular categories, with real examples:
– the long, unwieldy ‘poetic’ sentence-as-title, which is currently very much in vogue and which I think was initially popularized by ‘My Head is On Fire But My Heart is Full of Love’ at Charlottenberg Museum in 2002. Examples include: ‘When Leaves Fall They Return to The Root, When I Die I’ll Have No Mouth’ (Philip Hausmeier, Museum 52, London 2008), ‘If You Destroy the Image You’ll Destroy the Thing Itself’ (Bergen Kunsthall, 2008) and ‘Peace and Agriculture in a Pre-Romantic Ideal Landscape, Without Sublime Terrors’ (Haunch of Venison, Berlin, 2008 – this title taken from a 1565 painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder).
– the oxymoron/homophone. Less popular these days than it was in the 1990s, but typical instances include ‘Blind Sight’ (Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, and Dundee Contemporary Arts, 2004), ‘Silent Noise’ (Jaume Plensa, Reina Sofia, Madrid, 1999) and ‘Sight/Site’ (ICA Philadelphia, 2001).
– and the frat boy, such as ‘Drunk vs. Stoned’ (Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, 2005) or ‘God Spoiled a Perfect Asshole When He Put Teeth in Yer Mouth’ (Dash Snow, Peres Projects, Los Angeles, 2007)

To be continued …

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