'It's time man. It feels imminent' : politics at the moment of exposition

This PhD is written in the context of the Curatorial/Knowledge programme at Goldsmiths College. It deals foremost with a conversation between art practice and the curatorial, where a thesis emerges as a consideration of art practice as more than just the work of an artist. In the context of the dissertation, art practice “stages” tensions between official, institutional and situated knowledge and knowledges that are unpredictable, unfixed, and uncontained — tensions that are at the heart of what is meant by “curatorial/knowledge. ” I make a distinction between the exhibition as a bracketed, temporally bound event, and “the moment of exposition” as a fleeting, intimacy that occurs unexpectedly and unintentionally as our exposure to the Other. The moment of exposition involves an exposure that is not necessarily formalised or even actualised in the exhibition, but like the exhibition involves some degree of publicness. A main question of the dissertation asks how regimes of legibility, efficacy, and legitimacy limit inhabitations of the political; and conversely, how remaining at the margins of institution is a way of “being” political. Part of this investigation involves differences between practices, not to be glossed over — differences that are key to the curatorial as a political mode of “being. ” The submission is made up of three main elements that form a textual/theoretical, material/archival work. These are: (1) A dimension of critical writing or dissertation that has two large sections: (a) The Learning Community (b) The Community of the Exhibition (2) Four appendices related to projects that took place in parallel to the writing. (3) An archive, which presents a major component of research in the form of a book project carried out wholly in the context of my doctoral research. Sketches of Universal History Compiled from Many Authors by Sarah Pierce (London: Book Works, 2013) demonstrates a primary analytic situation for the problematics of my research.