Marres Center for Contemporary Culture, Maastricht, Netherlands
Specters of the ‘90s brings together work produced in the 1990s by a collection of artist who were then mostly working in Europe and had personal connections both to each other and to the curators. The exhibition attempts to counter commonly held perceptions of the 1990’s as a transitional phase of diffusion and discursive drift between more clearly defined periods. At the same time, however, it complicates any effort to construct overarching critical narratives and think period styles at all by organizing work tied together by the contingencies of interpersonal relationships into strict chronological order within the arbitrary bounds of a decade. Within this the stylistic similarities and shared structural and theoretical engagements of the work remain implicit but intensely present in the exhibition.
The work exhibited in Specters of the ‘90s represents a collection of projects taking place as institutional critique entered a later, more developed phase after its development in the 1980s and a range of collaborative, event-based projects that would prefigure relational practices of the 2000s. Themes of documentation and archive-making appear repeatedly in the work, either as the material of piece or as a record of an ephemeral event. This made the task of exhibition design, at times, become that of making an archive of archives. This, and the limitations of the budget and the historic nature of the exhibition space, called for a minimal and consistent approach to the design that allows designed elements to stand out as clearly distinct from the art works and yet not become a distraction or an object in itself.
The exhibition brings together a wide range of material from video work to printed matter to objects and small-scale installation pieces. Additionally, many pieces require different types of material to be displayed together in specific ways. This is accomplished by a series of display elements that can be adjusted to accommodate different display conditions. Aesthetically it was important that the elements not appear as either neutral gallery plinths or specific furniture pieces like the ones already present in many of the installations. After developing a series of alternatives, the final design was narrowed down to include a number of glass-topped vitrine tables, monitor and projector stands and small desk elements for interactive computer stations.
Vitrine Tables
The boxes forming the tops of these tables assume varying depths from pressing flat material against the glass top to a depth sufficient to display book-sized objects and archive boxes of smaller material. Larger objects can also be displayed on top of the glass allowing for diverse types of material to be assembled together according to the curators’ needs.
Flying Display Panels
Much of the work in the exhibition reacts to the smooth white walls of an ideal museum or gallery space. Rather than try to introduce this condition in the space, only to critique it, a series of white display surfaces are created that act as fragments of a museum, appearing when work requires a white wall to be displayed on. The display surfaces stand off from the existing walls far enough to “fly” over such details as door trim and windowsills.
Media Stands
These stands can be constructed at varying heights to support video monitors, video or slide projectors and other devices for displaying media work. The design references the utilitarian sturdiness of library or institutional furniture rather than the minimalism of conventional gallery displays.
