An Exhibit is a Real Life Genre (Sort of?)

In Edouard Duval-Carrié’s exhibit Decolonizing Refinement, the artifacts were either abstract configurations of the artist’s own making (sculptures, paintings, and other physical art forms), photographs that captured moments during slavery (the focus of the exhibit), and actual findings from the time period the exhibit commented on.

The main piece that stood out to me, and vividly so, was his work titled the “Metamorphosis”. This piece was meant to explain the severing of culture from origin that occurred during the slave trade and the forced adjustment, including the family histories that were lost, that slaves had to encounter as their homelands were left in shambles. The image depicts a tree with branches that are made to model the prototype of a family tree. The roots of the tree are shackled to America as to symbolize involuntary restraint. A smaller detail that I caught was the depiction of a small island, in what I presume to be the West Indies (maybe Jamaica), set to fire. I believe the entire image comments on the destruction slavery brought onto the traditions of other cultures as well as long lasting effects of poverty and delayed economic development, as the thinkers and innovators of these countries were stripped away.

           
While the exhibit contains a variety of art forms that depict different scenarios, each artifact shares key components that push them to be apart of a singular genre, which I would label to be, if the category does not already exist, an expressive retelling.

            Amy J. Devitt explains in her discussion “New Conceptions of Genre” that genres arise out of necessity (576). She explains that genres “develop” because of their tendency to respond to specific scenarios when applied appropriately (576). This can be attributed to the fact that while not all the same for of text, hybrids and simpler forms, the artifacts in Duval-Carrié’s exhibit, they all pertain to and elaborate on the same subject matter, calling on each other artifact present in the exhibit to complete the retelling of the historical events the artist aims to have remembered and understood in a new light. 

            To answer the question of how these topics complicate the concept of genre, I suppose genre would have to be understood in a sort of base form. Genre is more complex than solely being defined as a group of things or texts that are each the same as each other in every aspect. Hybrid texts (a combinatory term used to explain multifaceted texts that utilize more that one text style/technology) complicate this alone by being more than one thing within one vessel. A genre is becoming something that is characterized by particular attributes and audience responses rather than only content/features. A more abstract theory could be that genres are based on how texts are understood rather than how they are portrayed by their creators. An example would be that because of more dominant audience perspectives, a film meant to be a romance could have be taken out of intended context (by the author/director/script writer, who could also have had a part in altering the portrayed perspectives of each other) and labeled in the public eye as a horror film (something many film sites and forums are dedicated to debating as it is a complexity that arises with intention being placed against audience reception). I believe this dilemma is what Devitt would refer to as genre becoming “deterministic” (579).

             To end her discussion, Devitt draws on the elements that present genre to be something that responds to “recurring situations” and that affirms, because what people find to be common or definitive of something else is subject to change most certainly through time, genre is subject to change as well, whether it be genre becoming more specific or genre becoming more vague (580). The artifacts in Duval-Carrié’s exhibit could be placed into smaller, far more tailored categories/sub-genres, however each relies too much on the other to assist in its own explanation, which is why a more broad genre fits the scenario of an exhibit. When used to review each other, both Devitt and Duval-Carrié explain, in essence, the versatile nature of genre and how it functions.
            I choose to believe that genres are becoming more expansive as society recognizes and innumerable amount of them, or as works constantly create their own categories. To make things easier in simpler conversations, people may refer to base genres that umbrella the myriads of labels. For our discussion, the more complex genres allow for better understandings of how the author thinks, especially when held parallel to the to the interpretations of the audience, can be seen as advantageous to extracting the most from a critical discussion of any text.