Orchard
Gallery Hours: Thurs–Sun 1 to 6

contact@orchard47.org
Rhea Anastas
Moyra Davey
Andrea Fraser
Nicolás Guagnini
Gareth James
Christian Philipp Müller
Jeff Preiss
R.H. Quaytman
Karin Schneider
Jason Simon
John Yancy, Jr.
Anonymous
Current Exhibition:



Future Exhibition:



Past Exhibitions:

Spring Wound
From One O to the Other
11 Sessions
Cookie Cutter
Calendar of flowers, gin bottles, steak bones
Image Coming Soon
Form of a waterfall. Sadie Benning
detourism
On The Collective For Living Cinema
Jef Geys
I Like You and You Like Me
Sylvia Rivera Law Project Art Opening
Around the Corner: Zoe Leonard, Petra Wunderlich, Christian Philipp Müller
Nicolás Guagnini: The Middle Class Goes to Heaven (2005–06)
Dan Graham: Death by Chocolate: West Edmonton Shopping Mall (1986–2005)

Reality/Play
Vera
Heard Not Seen
Having Been Described In Words
Painters Without Paintings and Paintings Without Painters
Small Works For Big Change
Michael Asher, film screening
Stephan Pascher, Lucky Chairs

Martin Beck
September 11. 1973.
Part Three, "Last Minute"
Polish Socialist Conceptualism of the 70s
Part Two
Part One
Martin Beck,
The details are not the details



Exhibition Dates: May 6 - June 10, 2007
Opening: Sunday May 6, 6-8 pm


On May 25, 2007 at 6:30 PM a discussion between Martin Beck and Felicity D. Scott will further investigate issues of exhibition systems, administrative logics and notions of spectatorship.
Martin Beck's exhibition "The details are not the details" investigates a shift in exhibition formats in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Until the late 1950s the art sector was the primary field within which experimentation with display strategies and new forms of looking and relating to visual culture were developed. But increasingly, commercial exhibiting — trade fairs, corporate, and government exhibits — became the sites where new presentational formats and techniques appeared. Some of the most significant museum exhibits of the 1950s demonstrate a powerful commitment to experimentation within exhibition making and display. These shows used the communicative power of exhibiting for a humanist and profoundly modern purpose: the belief that the dissemination of and access to information is a key aspect in the development of a modern and democratic society. Although deeply ideological, these exhibitions cast the information presented as an untainted universal that — properly organized, indexed, and made physically accessible — had the capability to produce an informed spectator, and, consequently, change society for the better. The exhibitory apparatus and display were the tools that were thought capable of realizing a utopian belief in the emancipatory potential of the exhibition as a communication format. Key to this moment is the concept of "information" as part of a modernizing drive in which emancipatory practices, propaganda and corporate advertising started to freely flow into each other. This coincides with research into computing technology, pattern science in architecture, the bureaucratization of the state apparatus as well as the emergence of the modern corporation as a distinct communicative form. A significant part of experimentation within the commercial field was driven by the idea of indexing and structuring information with a special emphasis on making visible as well as portable this newly developed structure. On a practical level this took the form of modularized exhibition systems based on connector joints which allow for quick, unskilled assembly and endless rectangular expansion: infinite growth as a utopia of dissemination. Many exhibition systems developed in this period bear striking resemblance to formal methodologies that surface only a few years later within Minimalism and, more metaphorically, in the indexical drive of Conceptual Art. Orthogonal exhibit systems and the connector joints they are based upon submit information and its dissemination under a geometric matrix the social logic of which should soon after be described as one of the ultimate tools of modernity's exercise of power. At the moment when the exhibition seems to become a free floating agent of liberation it succumbs to the symbolic logic of control. The history of modern exhibitions has repeatedly been a site of investigation and reference point for Beck's artistic practice. "The details are not the details" will include a new video work, a series of diagrammatic drawings, and a spatial treatment by Beck. The show intersects these elements with historical material on the subject, a work by Sol Lewitt, and a photograph by Eadweard Muybridge.