The Bride and the Bachelors @ Barbican

Duchamp, Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns, these five artists embraced, revelled in, loved chance, yet the show devoted to their work, interrelationships and mutual influences is an explicitly scripted experience. Rather than curated, however, it is a mise-en-scène by Philippe Parreno, a noteworthy distinction. Curating is an indefinable business in today's theoretical universe, so it is hardly surprising, and, given the five artists' penchant for the aleatory, it is fitting that the guide should point out in this indirect way the instability of the term. This mise-en-scène is scripted, however, from the entrance-level beginning to first-floor development, where the sections of the gallery space are numbered 1 to 8 beginning with the area immediately to the left of the top of the stairs. That the artists were so committed to chance, however, does not preclude an ordered exhibition from being a worthwhile and appropriate forum for their work. Order enables participants to identify a narrative and to understand Duchamp, Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns in their enmeshed context and showcases their impact on the panoply of modes of artistic making throughout the 20th century.

Participants therefore emerge from a rich experience of visual art, sculpture, assemblages, set designs, music and writing having experimented with their faculties of perception, able to answer the questions what is 20th-century art; what is art; what have been the results of artistic collaboration? This way the show educates participants, demonstrating the relevance of the five artists to trends in the 20th-century arts, in terms of both art historical and artistic terms, contexts and techniques. Besides this, the opportunity to experience these art works in reality and together stresses the importance of relationships in Parreno's presentation.

More specifically, the staging of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912) opposite Rauschenberg's Express (1963) delineates a significant continuity in the two artists' conceptions of the visual art work. Insofar as Duchamp's Nude recalls stop-motion photography and Rauschenberg's Express combines photographic images in a multiply stratified composition, one sees the influence of photographic technology on attitudes towards perception and visual presentation. Express may be likened to a procession of slides or a montage of photo-still memories whereas Nude takes an extended moment in time and portrays its unfolding. Here the mise-en-scène collapses a 50-year gap.

If relationships are emphasised by the exhibition, then so are collaborations. Rauschenberg apparently referred to working together as an intrinsic feature of dance, where people make art sharing skills, which he envied presumably because the lone visual artist or sculptor is not explicitly collaborative. Perhaps this explains his affection for assemblages: they enabled him to unify the disparate, making a common ground for combining the ostensibly, traditionally and typically non-combinable. Just as the hive mind, fellowship or fraternity-sorority has been regarded as a powerful force for making, so is there potency in the many-bodied art work.

Change is another significant theme, quite revolutionary change in the ways art is made and how it looks. In this regard the exhibition, commendably, does not strike me as trying to shock or thrill the visitor, however. Even when we are supposed to see how Duchamp's work was perceived as a challenge to received modes of artistic making and to acceptability in the case of Nude No. 2 and Fountain (1917), there is no sense of him as a revolutionary of the overzealous, more-sound-and-fury-than-brains-and-purpose type. This helps, of course, to convince visitors of the historical importance of this figure and his four most immediate acolytes.

In its holistic presentation of the plenitude of artistic making through fusing so many types of art and showcasing artists who worked across various media, this show also reminds us occasionally to switch off the mind when considering art in order to give way to what I would term a more bodily appreciation. This exhibition is suited perfectly to responses of this sort because it recalls us to our senses, “re-embodies” us as feeling creatures, not just knowing or thinking ones. The soundscape consisting in Cage's and others' music penetrates our experience of the exhibition to envelop us in it, bringing together the space and the objects therein, and complements the various textures of the displays and use of light, alerting our senses of sound and touch as well as sight.