Exhibition Reviews

Abstract

The Possible was not just an exhibition. It was an extraordinarily ambitious social project, which aimed to reimagine the space and purpose of the museum. Guest curated by the Oakland-based artist David Wilson, The Possible transformed the Berkeley Art Museum (BAM) from a site of judgment and static display into a place alive with change and artistic creation. Wilson’s practice often involves collaboration and community organizing. In Arrivals, a recent project that Wilson created for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the artist prepared a series of handdrawn maps to lead visitors on self-guided walks around the city. Each tour culminated at a site where Wilson and his artistic collaborators had created a sound experience. Visitors could relive these performances by listening to tape recordings that were stashed at the sites. As in Arrivals, The Possible harnessed the creativity of the diverse members of Wilson’s artistic circle, from musicians and performance artists to historians and visual artists, and aimed to share the sometimes solitary experience of making art with other artists and visitors, when they elected to participate in the Sunday workshops. For The Possible Wilson identified more than eighty artistic collaborators and invited them to participate through an elaborate mail-art campaign; this early stage correspondence was documented on the exhibition’s website, the-possible.org. Responding to Wilson’s invitations, the artists proposed workshops to be conducted in makeshift studios in the museum during the course of the exhibition. As artists and workshop participants created work to fill the galleries, the exhibition would evolve continuously during its five months in residence at BAM. The exhibition divided the Museum’s large main gallery into three studios: ceramics, printmaking, and textiles. The walls between these spaces were lined with works in progress and the tools of their creation, from looms and dye vats to Xerox copiers and clay. Upstairs a recording studio hosted musicians and sound artists. Like Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel,” the implication was that all art might be contained in these galleries. By offering up the tools of production, one canmake (almost) any artwork imaginable. The exhibition reveled in the inchoate nature of artistic process; the constantly changing gallery displays and open studios presented a direct challenge to the perfection of typical contemporary art exhibitions, whose professional lighting and installation tend to fix the object rather than highlight its potential for flux. museums and social issues, Vol. 9 No. 2, October, 2014, 144–151