The Dense Image was developed in conjunction with the Institute for Curatorial Practice at Hampshire College (June 1 – July 3, 2014) which included three weeks of curatorial theory and exhibition history and two weeks of conceptual mapping, essay writing, and web design. Adrian Piper’s Ur-Mutter #2 (1989), part of Mount Holyoke College Art Museum’s collection, was the foundational image for our curatorial process. Derived from themes uncovered in Adrian Piper’s work, The Dense Image functions as a network of images, sources, and flows of information that complicate the artistic and curatorial practice of appropriation .

Adrian Piper’s Ur-Mutter #2

Adrian Piper’s Ur-Mutter #2 exists as a complex layering of formats, narratives, and agencies. Piper bought the rights to a photograph of a Somali woman and child made by Peter Turnley, and in 1989 re-photographed and reprinted it at a larger scale. She silk screened the words: “We made you” across the bottom in red, and framed the new object in reflective glass. Each layer occupies its own specific moment in time, all of which can be seen in the viewer’s present: the original woman and child, Peter Turnley’s photograph and its appearance in print, Piper’s photograph of the image, Piper’s reproduction, textual addition and frame. The viewer sees its environment, too: lighting, wall color, text, fellow viewers, reflections in the glass. Here, we add another layer by placing it on our website, substituting the glass of the frame for the computer screen.

“The Pied Piper”

In a workshop for the Institute for Curatorial Practice lead by John R. Stomberg, the Florence Finch Abbott Director and Lecturer in Art at Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Ur-Mutter #2 was taken through the galleries of the permanent collection. In each room, the group stopped to discuss Adrian Piper’s work in relation to the themes of the gallery. Each time, new information was generated as we rewrote Piper’s work into the new gallery context.

Just as Ur-Mutter #2 was physically ushered from gallery to gallery, context to context, its life as a digital image presents an endless potential for (re)contextualization. Through the drag and drop process, the image stretches itself through digital space. Its context transcends the artist’s intentions and the curatorial thesis, as its meaning is both imploded and expanded, its borders opened, and its appropriative nature perpetuated.

The Digital Space

In line with the generative nature of Ur-Mutter #2, it is important to acknowledge that this exhibition furthers the appropriative process and does not lead the image to a second stand still. The digital platform promotes the appropriative/appropriated nature of Ur-Mutter #2 by inserting the work into another complex, networked system. The Dense Image is only one of its many locations on the web.

In creating the website, we saw code and coding as entirely practical, a tool for projecting our concept onto the web unconnected to our concept. Our initial understanding was that the tools at our disposal were not unlike lumber, nails, hammers and screws that are used to build a house. A designer has a vision, aesthetic, functional, structural etc., and those tools and materials facilitate the realization of that. However, through numerous conversations, and experiences, the tool metaphor began to break down. Even in website building, it is not about the single object, the unique piece: it is about a concept which can be logged into. We discovered that website construction is fundamentally appropriative. Designers investigate the code and structures of websites for inspiration and solutions. Students of coding break designs to fix and reconfigure them. The language and tools of HTML and CSS evolve according to those new appropriative attempts to devise work arounds for the limitations of the code. In light of these facts we recognize web design as an appropriative act and generative in the same way that the production of these artworks and curating are.

The Dense Image

Within this site, our curatorial processes are exposed through both the visual and written mapping of images, revealing the ambiguous nature of our exhibition as the work of individuals and a collective. As we organized our own thoughts on the works of others, works which were already organizations of preexistent images, the dichotomy between curator/artist began to disappear. Exhibition of appropriation or appropriation as exhibition? Commentary on artworks, or artworks as commentary?

The design of The Dense Image reflects the digital platform as just one nodal point in a complex network of information flows. This digital space is not a stand in for a physical gallery; the artworks were selected for conceptual resonance, not “aura.” The Dense Image exists between the Salon and the Desktop, visually referencing their non-linear organizations. This allows for both rigorous engagement and the reductive drag-and-drop processes so prevalent in digital space.

Lily Bartle, Hayley-Jane Blackstone, Daniel Perlmutter, Luke Pretz, Isadora Reisner, Laura Ritchie, 2014

Special thanks to: Museums 10, The Institute for Curatorial Practice, Eric Peterson and all Five Colleges instructors and staff for making this possible.