Terma, Images from the Ear or Groin or Somewhere

The inaugural exhibition celebrating the opening of the University Arts Building and the John and Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art, University of Nevada, Reno.

“Where a narrative implies an “orderly” progression through time and space, a lyric museum is about another sense. The philosopher Jan Zwicky says it well: “The eros of philosophy is clarity. The eros of lyric is coherence” (2015, 3). A lyric museum is less concerned with creating a clear narrative and assigning fixed roles to subjects, and is instead devoted to finding a kind of unity or coherence in proliferation, in the interaction of specific objects in the museum space. Zwicky goes on to quote Heraclitus, at his most mellifluous: “The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings” (2015, 42). In a funny way, the “heap” is the coherence. A heap is a form, and there is formal pleasure in museums that appear to be mere heaps. Some museums gain their charm from the collision and touch of form-on-form.” (Jared Stanley)