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Wednesday, July 27, 2022

Matthew Angelo Harrison at MIT List Visual Arts Center

(link)

Compositionalization, as an artistic strategy, might have born out a Broodthaers' insight that "the arrangements of display [were] credence to meaning, institutional or otherwise." Highlighting museum display absurdity, a department of eagles. Oddly meaning still worked, stupidly. The meaning was in the display's pedagogical function, implicitly stating "meaning, here, now." Somewhere along the trickle of this history things got confused and now press releases are written now where objects once again "speak of" histories or "examine" the great big. But its a function of display, of compositionalization, of rearranging signs in picasso-like forms, until an inkblot appears in the sandbox of culture, art, where we move playthings around to feel control over them, wizards of a fantastical land, us.