Stuff in a room: Thoughts on Rowland’s 2018 MoCA show

D37 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles appears to be a sparce and almost austere arrangement of everyday objects: second-hand bikes, leaf blowers, hedge trimmers, and a stroller. At first glance these objects appear as unremarkable detritus of daily life. But a closer inspection reveals a shared tag affixed to each item: ‘rental at cost’.[1] This phrase marks the entrance into Cameron Rowland’s exacting critique of institutional power, financialised life, and racial capitalism.

These objects, seized at state auctions where police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection can retain up to 100% of the revenue, are not merely sculptural readymades. They are residues of carceral economies. Their histories of confiscation and liquidation are not erased by the museum context; they are intensified. As Rowland makes explicit, aesthetic display does not absolve institutional complicity – it renders it visible.

Crucially, these works are not for sale. They are leased with the rental fees calculated only to cover maintenance and logistics. In doing so, Rowland introduces contractual constraints that subvert the conventional commodification of contemporary art. The museum is thus faced with a binary: comply with the terms and acknowledge its own embeddedness in extractive structures, or disengage entirely.

This institutional bind is at the heart of D37. The exhibition refuses passive spectatorship. It transforms the museum from neutral container to implicated, unsettling longstanding curatorial norms. Where curating is often framed as stewardship or translation, here it becomes a form of negotiation; legal, ethical, and political. These are, as Fernando Domínguez Rubio coined, ‘unruly objects’[2] – works that evade collection, resist acquisition, and defy easy framing.

The implications for curatorial practice are profound. How do institutions present work that rejects ownership? How might curating itself serve as critique, rather than merely facilitate critique? These questions echo through the work of figures like Andrea Fraser[3] and Fred Wilson[4], who exposed how museums replicate colonial and capitalist paradigms. But Rowland takes this further, embedding critique directly into the legal terms of institutional engagement.

A work like ‘Summer 3d One Stroller sold for $1.00’[5], which one passed through a police auction, encapsulates the tensions at play. The object is banal yet loaded. In the white cube, its presence underscores how easily personal property becomes liquidated state asset, and how cultural institutions risk aestheticizing this violence.

Rowland’s own intervention is not just about visibility; it’s about accountability. D37 asks not just what art institutions show, but how they operate and whom they serve. In doing so, it reframes the museum space as a site of economic and legal struggle. The viewer is not outside this struggle but embedded within it.

This is not an exhibition that resolves. It implicates, disrupts, and resists closure. And in doing so, it issues an urgent call: to curators, critics, and institutions, to consider whether we are up to the ethical demands of truly radical work.

[1] Cameron Rowland, 'D37', [Los Angeles: MOCA, 2018-19], https://www.moca.org/storage/app/media/CameronRowland_D37_Pamphlet.pdf [accessed 16 February 2025] [Exhibition Handout] p12.

[2] Fernando Domínguez Rubio, 'Preserving the Unpreservable: Docile and Unruly Objects at MoMA', Theory and Society, 43:6 [2014] 617-645.

[3] Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser,  [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005].

[4] Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum, [Maryland: Maryland Historical Society, 1992].

[5] Cameron Rowland, 'D37’, p.12.