Herring Under a Fur Coat

Exhibition making, simultaneously opening up to a larger world of cultural production and developing its own internal logic, is quickly becoming the new vanity-project of choice for DJs and fashion designers, as the practice of curating deepens its theoretical base in higher academia. Within this context, Herring Under a Fur Coat was formulated to revisit some of the unquestioned conventions of mounting an art exhibition.

Group exhibitions often follow a sound but uninspired process: a theme or concept is developed, artists or their works are chosen, and wall/floor space is designated accordingly. In Herring Under a Fur Coat, the three artists, Caitlin Berrigan, Michael Höpfner and Martin Kohout, were curated, one can say, vertically rather than horizontally. Where traditional group exhibitions parcel out delimited wall/floor space to the artists, Herring Under a Fur Coat gives each artist a section of the volume of the entire space. Roughly speaking, Kohout occupies from zero to 1.3 meters of the entire gallery, Berrigan from 1.3 to 1.8 meters, and Höpfner from 1.8 meters to the ceiling.

Architects have long cultivated the generative potentials of densification – most easily and efficiently accomplished through the stacking of diverse programs. Like the eponymous Russian layered-salad, Herring Under a Fur Coat stacks the artists on top of one another – allowing interaction that is spatially, rather than thematically determined.