Tu Quoque – Exhibition as Desired Space
Asymmetries within imagining exhibition situations, expressions and their
representations are mirroring the crossfire of a perhaps heated conversation
about a work of art in an exhibition space. This is how an initial association
might turn out. This could be a starting point for this work of art.
In Jennifer Gelardo's exhibition Drama of Consensus - Exhibition as Desired Space,
the actual exhibition space is duplicated several times: in the documentation of
the mock game conceived by Gelardo, it becomes an object of speculation and in
the series of exhibition photography that is part of the growing archive of the
artist, we gain insights into exhibition situations of some of our contemporaries.
In the documented performance of Tu Quoque #18 three participants are entrusted
with the set of rules by a game master: Each participant chooses a plate-shaped
game token of a specific color and marbles, also of different colors, which both
begin to symbolize a "rhetorical figure" and which specify the individual’s course
of action in the course of the game.
The goal of the game is to obtain the sovereignty of interpretation over what an
ideal space for art could look like. The game is won when the other players are
caught using the argumentative structure of one of their opponents. The rhetorical
figures chosen in the round of the game that we see in the video are “False
analogy", "Appeal to emotion" and "False dilemma”.
What we experience within this - under scientific aspects camouflaged - artistic
intervention is, so to speak, the inversion of an observation of persons in an
artificial situation. Thus, it is precisely the given roles, consequently the played
arguments, that contain the remnants of the de-individualized characters. It is this
characteristic of the game that forces the moment of argumentative stumbling,
in that the rhetorical strategies of persuasion more often than not become absurd.
(...)
words by Maximilian Klawitter, München 2021