Labyrinths VI: Postmodern theory, the labyrinth and curation. A passage from Paul O’Neill (2016) The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Cultures Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press. P.91f.                   

This just wants quoting and preserving from section called ‘The Exhibition as Form’. It reflects on all my other pieces and gives potential to deepen them:

'As well as being linguistic or semiotic, exhibitions are spatial. …They induce forms that migrate between fields of haptic, visual, and auditory relations. …

(On Lyotard’s 1985 exhibition “Les Immatériaux’)

Focusing on the exhibition’s labyrinthine quality, Lyotard declared it a phenomenological and spatial form. In this, … tested the concept of the exhibition as a sensorial experience with its own qualities and properties that collectively produce its own genre of art in which ideas, artworks, objects, and zones of interpretation intersect, sensorially, philosophically and spatially.’

Linked to this quotation (but written before seeing it) are:

1.       The exhibition The Green Man in and of the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh University collated and curated by Lucy Skaer and others.

2.       An art installation on Maritime Lane, Leith Adam Linklater: Mythopoeia by Andy Cummings .

3.       An introduction through Charlotte Higgins’s new book.

4.       An addendum: the way in to Anselm Kiefer - a labyrinth with no end has, of course, no way out.

5.       A second addendum - Paul Broks: the labyrinth in the Neuropsycholgist's Odyssey (this one).

Steve