IN

08:44

OUT

20:16

For In 8:44 Out 20:16, a curatorial performance lasting eleven hours and thirty-two minutes, a selection of 186 drawings was made from the 30,000 architectural works on paper held in the Drawing Matter collection at Shatwell Farmyard, Somerset, England, approximately two hours west of London. The curators were given a single day, from sunrise to sunset, to create an exhibition from the vast archive of works dating from the sixteenth century to the present, assembled by the collection’s founder, Niall Hobhouse.

The curatorial team convened in the archive on January 21, 2017, entering at 8:44 a.m. and departing at 8:16 p.m. The group embarked upon what could be compared to a delirious dérive: no preconceptions, no rules, and no clear objective except to make a selection of drawings before the natural light faded, at sunset. The search began with simple curiosities regarding specific architects, periods, and movements but soon branched off in other directions, following the threads of chance encounters provoked by the alphabetical organization of the drawing chests, which generated unintentional but thought-provoking juxtapositions. New themes, categories, relations, bodies of work, and key drawings began to emerge. The process was intuitive and grew out of the impromptu logic of the day, in which the group detected patterns, consistencies, contrasts, and attributes of the drawings around which to assemble the selection.

The drawings were presented in the gallery of the Princeton University School of Architecture as the first lines of an inquiry that was intended to provoke discourse and further investigation by students. The exhibition includes works by Gunnar Asplund, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Joseph Boshier, Constant (Nieuwenhuys), Le Corbusier, Salvador Dalí, Guy Debord, Hermann Finsterlin, Buckminster Fuller, Adolf Hitler, Jean-Paul Jungmann, Ugo La Pietra, John Lautner, Peter Märkli, Gordon Matta-Clark, Mies van der Rohe, Charles Percier, Hans Poelzig, Cedric Price, Aldo Rossi, Antonio da Sangallo, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Mario Sironi, Álvaro Siza, James Stirling, Superstudio, Michael Webb, and Marie-José Van Hee, among others.

Playing off Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the "assisted readymade," a work composed of manufactured objects that have been modified by the artist, the installation hacks common pieces of office furniture, including flat files and filing cabinets, to produce new exhibition devices. A number of typical gray steel cabinets were dissected, extruded, sliced, hinged, or oriented on their sides and mounted on the wall. Each intervention transforms an efficient storage system into a deviant display apparatus that instigates unconventional encounters with art.

The exhibited works were collaboratively selected with Niall Hobhouse.

For more information, visit www.drawingmatter.org.