PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Barnes Foundation presents Mark Dion, Judy Pfaff, Fred Wilson: The Order of Things, an exhibition featuring new works commissioned by the Barnes Foundation on view from May 16 through August 3, 2015. For this exhibition, Mark Dion, Judy Pfaff and Fred Wilson were invited to respond to the unusual way that Dr. Albert C. Barnes displayed his collection. The results are three large-scale installations and a sound intervention that bring contemporary ideas into dialogue with the permanent collection and its installation at the Barnes. The exhibition also features a re-creation of The Dutch Room, a small space in the Merion gallery building that was removed to install an elevator in the 1990s.
The curious display of the Barnes Collection, organized into what Dr. Barnes referred to as ensembles, is one of the hallmarks of the Barnes Foundation. Nearly a century ago Dr. Barnes overturned traditional categories of display—mixing together objects from different cultures, time periods, and media—and invented his own highly-structured system for ordering the world. Much like an installation artist, Dr. Barnes endowed objects with new meanings simply by shifting their context.
“Barnes’s ensembles are ripe for analysis,” says Martha Lucy, Barnes Foundation Consulting Curator and Assistant Professor of Art History at Drexel University in Philadelphia. “Dr. Barnes arranged his collection in a very unconventional way; he ignored chronology and history and hung things together that normally would never share a wall—a Cézanne with an El Greco, for example. What Dr. Barnes did was replace the traditional display system with one of his own: Each of his assemblages is perfectly symmetrical, perfectly ordered, and set in place for perpetuity. This is what the artists are responding to in The Order of Things. Mark Dion, Judy Pfaff, and Fred Wilson are all riffing on Barnes. Their responses are thoughtful and provocative, and we hope they will offer audiences new ways to think about Barnes's display.”
In his work The Incomplete Naturalist, Mark Dion creates an enormous Barnesian ensemble using the arcane tools of an imaginary naturalist. In Dion’s words, his piece begs the question, “What if Dr. Barnes applied his aesthetic and methodology to natural history rather than art history?" The artist also asks viewers to consider the “destructive” nature of collecting, or what happens when an object moves from the world into a collector’s personal microcosm.
In an immersive large-scale floor piece entitled Scene I: The Garden. Enter Mrs. Barnes, Judy Pfaff plays on the tension in Barnes’s ensembles between order and disorder. Towering steel structures and fluorescent bulbs evoke the collector’s strict symmetry, while a sprawling chandelier suggests a certain disobedience of the system. Of her artistic process, Pfaff says, “I find so many similarities between my art-making and Barnes's collecting. I pull inspiration from so many different sources." Many elements of the piece evoke plants and gardens, a reference to the importance of Laura Barnes and the Barnes Arboretum in the collector’s aesthetic.
For his work Trace, Fred Wilson creates a series of small rooms—a museum within a museum—in which he displays “readymade ensembles” and juxtapositions of rarely-seen objects from Barnes storage in a playful remix of Dr. Barnes’s ideas. The exhibition also includes a “sound collage” featuring music native of the African tribes that created many of the sculptures and masks in the Barnes African collection. Several weeks into the exhibition, the sound element will extend into the Collection Gallery, where the artist uses music to create a dialogue with the objects on display, much as Dr. Barnes did in his lifetime. Dr. Barnes had a great affinity for music, which not only played a significant role in his personal and intellectual life but also in the educational program of the Foundation. "I am greatly inspired by Dr. Barnes—his passion, intellect, love of art, respect for artists and desire for social change,” says Wilson. “In his own unique way, he put his money where his mouth was.” Wilson’s piece marks the first time a contemporary artist has introduced sound into the Barnes Foundation’s special exhibition space, as well as the first time Dr. Barnes’s own music will be played in the Collection Gallery as part of a special exhibition.
The show also includes an installation designed by Dr. Barnes in the early 20th century. Called The Dutch Room, the installation was disassembled in the mid-1990s to allow for the construction of an elevator in Merion. The works of art from The Dutch Room have recently undergone conservation and are being presented to the public for the first time in over two decades; the room also serves as an example of Barnes’s display methods in the company of the three contemporary responses.
Curated by Martha Lucy, Barnes Foundation Consulting Curator and Assistant Professor of Art History at Drexel University in Philadelphia, The Order of Things will serve to better orient visitors to the Barnes Foundation, offering an explanation of the philosophy behind the organization of the collection and of the ensembles’ importance in the history of museum practice. At the same time—and in keeping with Barnes’s commitment to the development of critical thinking skills—this exhibition invites visitors to think actively about the display of collections more generally. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue featuring an essay and catalogue entries by Lucy, as well as contributions from artists, critics, collectors, scholars, who each add their ideas about Dr. Barnes and his ensembles ($19.95). Photography will be permitted in the special exhibition space for The Order of Things.
