ey day

One thing visitors won’t be getting is lots of information on the walls. Each objet will be identified in situ – but there is only one substantive text panel, at the show’s start, while each of the exhibition’s seven sections will be prefaced only by a single quotation, such as “Art is never chaste” (for the grouping called Surreal Anxiety and Desire/1924-34).

It’s completely intentional, of course. Didactic panels bunch up viewers and tend to mediate, even “blind” their experience of the art, Baldassari said.

“What we need to do is go freely to the work. We have to have the courage to be nude in front of the works. An exhibition is not a text, is not a book. We don’t need any explanation at the first level of contact ... to respect it, to put people under its power. What is an exhibition but a machine to exhibit people to the work? We need to be in a direct relation, without any ‘facilities,’ no small stories, no narratives.”