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 an immersive large-scale floor piece titled 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.
