Curate and be Damned
By Klega / artisan curateur (tout corps d’etat)
This essay responds to an invitation to write about and around the group exhibition Private Song 1, on view at Doosan Gallery, Seoul, from July 22 to August 19, 2020.
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I.
Cura, is a Latin word meaning to take care of, or to administer; it is also a deity, credited with creating the human figure from mud. Care is also the personification of both creation or poverty and lack. This notion has found its way into Kierkegaard’s work, and from there into Heidegger’s concept of Dasein. He describes Dasein as ‘being in the world’. Dasein is absorbed by the world (of beings or things) and therefore absent from itself. Heidegger’s Dasein is lost ‘in the midst of things’ it is concerned with and therefore oblivious of Being in itself. It’s essence is ‘Sorge’ (care), it take care of the world of things and is therefore lost to them. The curator is also lost to things. They need to be taken care of, safeguarded, organised, arranged and displayed. The task of the traditional curator is care and arrangement, the order of things. He arranges the world of things into the order in which we (are supposed to) understand them. Just like Borges notorious “certain Chinese encyclopaedia” arrangements are forms of understanding (Borges, p126). The curator was the (p)artisan of the world of things…..Not any more.
II.
At the dawn of the era of the independent exhibition, curator Harald Szeemann notes that, even today, he does everything “From Vision to Nail” (interview in Obrist 2008 p104, p111) He takes care of artworks and by doing so he creates an “organism called an exhibition” (interview in Obrist 2008, p126). At the time, no one would have claimed the exhibition to be an artwork; barely 25 years later, the curator of works of art is able to assume the very different position of ‘creator’. This is the argument made by Jonathan Watkins in the essay “The Curator as Artist”, 1987 (Watkins, p27f). After years of artists using ‘curating’ as their own artistic and discursive practice (Broothaers, Group Material, General Idea, etc). Watkins draws the conclusion that the exhibition is a medium of artistic practice. The curator steps out of his “invisibility” between the artwork and the audience, to claim the authorship of the exhibition which mediates the work to the spectator. If the selection of the artist is art – after Duchamp – then the selection of the curator should have the same value. This implies a “move away from an artist-centred cultural hierarchy towards a post-productive discourse, in which the function of curating has become another recognised part of the expanded field of art- making” (O’Neill 2007, p120).
In the essay “Multiple Authorship” Boris Groys equally argues that, after Duchamp, the ‘work’ of the artist consists of selection and the framing of the meaning of things made by others and identifies the emergence of installation art and the emergence of the curator who just as the artist selects things to organise an exhibition (display). In his essay, Groys comes to the conclusion that “[a] distinction between the (curated) exhibition and the (artistic) installation is still commonly made, but it is essentially obsolete.” (Groys 2005 p94). For Groys the contestation of autonomy and authorship has been decided by the event-character of the current mode of exhibitions. The flying circus of “jet-set flâneurs” (Rugof, in O'Neill, 2010, p20), curators and artists, roam the globe installing biennale mega-shows, like a global ‘archipelago biennale’. The curator uses the individual works to “manifest” their own theoretical, political or polemical positions on contemporary modes of the production of meaning. The mode of production today (i.e.2005), according to Groys is primarily collective, “new work is produced by an artist in collaboration with a curator, with a conscious goal to be placed in a certain theoretical, political, or artistic context” (Groys 2005 p94). He goes so far as to define the artwork’s very existence by the act of the exhibition: “What is an artwork? The answer that present-day art practices offer to this question is straightforward: The artwork is an exhibited object. The object that is not exhibited is not an artwork, but merely an object that has the potential to be exhibited as an artwork” (Groys 2005 p94).
The continuous tsunami of catalogues, magazines and websites generate a vast ‘Musée Imaginaire’.
The Empire of White cubes needs to be continuously re-filled and re-arranged. The contemporary curator’s natural habitat is the white cube, often a vast series of white cubes. White cube galleries are ‘modern’, but not necessarily as modern as we think. Protestant iconoclasm of the 16th century whitewashed the frescos of catholic churches and removed all painted and sculpted altar pieces, as we see in paintings by Saenredam and de Hooch. Protestant churches became as plain as the white cubes we see today. Lutheran churches on the other hand, appear similar to todays galleries. They kept the stained glass windows and some of the painted art on top of the whitewashed walls. There are many galleries using churches – Gallerie W. Köning in Berlin makes an excellent example, despite its spray-cement walls. To make their dependence on the white cube even more evident some contemporary curators shun the white cube entirely, organizing shows in public or storage spaces and kitchens. The flying circus of global exhibitions soaks up vast amounts of funding, “since the second part of the '90s fundraising has become the essential task of a curator, at least 50 percent of my work today has to do with fundraising and not the exhibitions” (O'Neill, 2007 interview with Obrist, p1). Therefore the selection of artists is more of an afterthought, choosing those artists useful for the theme of the exhibition and those selling enough to get the necessary funding from buyers or galleries.
Groys omits to clarify much about the subject of funding in the ‘art-business’. The contemporary exhibition circuit is at the confluence of public funding, commercial galleries and corporate sponsorship. In public art competitions those artists prevail who can sell the proposed work in advance to their collectors and that way to bring their own production funding to the public arts body (e.g. Fourth Plinth in London). The factor of funding for extravagant exhibitions pervades the whole biome of the art-world. Institutions like museums, galleries, alternative spaces multiplied and administrations grew proportionately to the new didactical and outreach programs bolted onto the public funding, paperwork multiplies while public budgets shrink. Raising alternate funding to pay for the myriad functions needed to organise a biennale is as, or probably more, essential, than the selection of artists. Artists become sub-contractors to a vast industry. In his arguments about current exhibition practice In the essay, Groys throws the classical museum under the bus. In his assessment, the museum is delegated to a pick-and-mix counter at Woolworth (Groys p98)
In her response to Groys, Clair Bishop argues against the identification of selection by the artist and by the curator. She describes the blow-back Szeemann faced from Daniel Buren (Documenta 5, 1972, p. 17.29, Robert Morris and nine other artists (flash---art.com) at Documenta 5, who strongly insisted on their authorial sovereignty to decide which work to select and under what headings to use it. In this context Bishop analyses Marcel Broodthaers’ subversive installation sequence of the “Musée d’Art Moderne”, an installation which preemptively assumed the ‘institutional form’ of the museum, framing its own content, slipping away from the curator-institutional appropriation of authority. Szeemann had arranged the section “Museums by Artists” at Documenta 5, to neatly contain such self-institutionalised works (Duchamp, Broodthaers, Vautier, Herbert Distel (Documenta 5, 1972, 13 • 1-14). By escaping curatorial didactic, the ambiguous “surplus” of meaning of the work exceeds “rational explanation” displacing “the work into an intellectual realm where it is rendered completely unavailable to any common interpretation” (Bishop 2005 #4). At the end of her response to Groys, Bishop describes a different version of curating, one in which “the expanded role of the curator dovetails with, and is inseparable from, the promotional productions of the culture industry” (Bishop 2005 §5).
Appropriate to the autonomy of the art and the autonomous artwork, the creative act has to be liberated from the embrace of the world, the economic necessity of base structure (studio) into the white cube, the world of the purely aesthetic experience determined entirely by its own ‘autonomy’. However, that is the space where the artist is detached from the work “[a]nd once the work is detached from the artist then it's subject to commerce, and then it has its extraordinary apotheosis in the auction house” (O'Neill, 2007 interview with Brian O’Doherty, p4).
III.
When we discuss the ‘selection-process’ of the artists’ works, it is clear that the works “are carefully chosen touches of color in the tableau that composes each section (room) as a whole” as Daniel Buren emphasised in 1972, in his letter to Szeemann. If pressed, we could call it euphemistically a “collaboration” between curator and artist as Groys suggests. Who these artists should be, appears in this context entirely the choice of a practical, commercial or subjective curatorial “sovereignty”. Organising exhibitions is like running a popup theme park – from the publicity to catering – and choosing your ‘collaborators’ or team is an important aspect in any commercial project. Additionally there is the aspect of the ‘selection’ of/by the audience. “The weapon of revenge is selection. Rejection, according to the classic scenario, feeds the artist's masochism, sense of injustice, and rage. Enough energy is generated to allow both artist and audience to presume they are fulfilling their social roles” (O'Doherty 1999 p74). The meaning of this selection/rejection is the scandalousness of the ‘new’ art practice. Selecting the audience would surely be a scandalous opportunity for the curator.
It is certainly necessary to establish what the position of the artist is within this global flying circus in relation to the audience, curator, the museum, biennale or gallery. Groys is clear that the “authorial praxis, as it functions in the context of art today, is increasingly like that of film, music, and theater” (Groys 2005 p97). If we accept the comparison of large exhibitions to film-productions – few in the audience complain about the relationship between actor or actress and the ‘director’ (pace metoo). If there is a bias, the more serious one seems the total amnesia of the economic interests woven into the very fabric of the Kulturindustrie. In that context the curator’s position is akin to a brothel-owner.
This is not to argue or conserve “authorial autonomy”, which is an ideological delusion of the 19th century. But – artworks have ways to come into presence. They also have the uncanny ability to slip away from the artist’s intention and assume their own agency in relation to the spectator, something that also befalls the intentions of the curator. Despite the curator’s ability to theorise the discourse within which the exhibition operates in a catalogue. In this sense the curator has the last word. Though, hopefully, the ambiguous “surplus”, the cornucopia of possibilities of meaning escapes the service it is pressed into in the networks of mega-exhibitions.
IV.
The next documenta should be curated by an artist, so someone said (Hoffmann 2003). We can see clearly now, that this is a rather ironic if not duplicitous demand (O'Neill, 2010, p23). The curator is already, at least theoretically within the discourse of art, an artist – selecting ‘artists’ to comment (in writing) on the curator’s navel-gazing discourse, is no more than being sarcastic. The curator has made his choice for these artists to publicly comment, who themselves neither select nor exhibit any ‘art’. In this case the comment on the discourse has become the artwork. It is curating with a kaleidoscope, Do It! Do It! Do It!
The selections of participating artists for large exhibitions are always subject to any amount of critique. After all, everyone would have curated a different show anyway. When a curator selects their partner or close friends – an ethics-panel is called. When artists are foisted on the curator by galleries there is less noise. Nor are many people seen to complain about curator couples, of which there were certainly a ‘couple’: if you want one you have to take the other half too. The ‘authorial sovereignty’ of artist/curator segues into a vicious circle. More precisely, the artist/curator is neither autonomous nor sovereign, instead embedded within scripts of what the various current discourses consider to be an artwork/exhibition – circling precariously around a black hole of capital in the ever continuing circus. The internal contradictions make what is called ‘fine art’ visibly a part of a less ‘fine’ Kulturindustrie. In particular the work process of artists who maintain a studio infrastructure and numerous specialists to manufacture their large scale works for those ‘mega’ exhibitions is “collaborative”, the artist makes a sketch, it’s discussed in terms of technical details and the team constructs it to the standards agreed; cashflow is a key issue. Large exhibitions like Documenta, Manifesta, XYZ Biennale/Triennale), etc. need sufficient publicity, foot-fall and financial backup to present the ‘block-buster-mega-circus’. It would be impossible to create such events without an institutional frameworks. Institutions, especially publicly funded ones, provide salaries, staff, social- and health insurance, while the selected artists have no such privilege, even as exhibitors; never mind those sub-contractors of the artists, the many technicians and studio assistants on minimum wage.
Since the nineties, museums and art-spaces had a larger number of visitors (in the UK) than football stadia. Imagine the Museum League negotiating huge TV contracts with for satellite TV. “The mainstream is now a muddy estuary isn't it, full of wetlands” (O'Neill, 2007 interview with Brian O’Doherty, p3). Even if you drain the swamp, there will be few crumbs left for those artists not selected.
V.
The function of the gatekeeper has moved from the commercial galleries to curators at least since the 1960s. Both systems lock out most of the people who come through the floodgates of an ever-increasing number of fine art and curating courses. What are the categories according to which artists are selected, promoted and supported, how do they have to ‘appear’, how does the work need to fit? Is it possible to discuss the selection process in terms of “justice”? How do we assess aesthetic, theoretical, political judgements? Selections depend on chance encounters, relationships (networking), serendipity, politics or blatant self-publicity – which are hard to tabulate? Is this questionable or are we looking for the solution to a non-existing problem? Would exhibitions be any better using open applications, a curating-lottery, or even artificial intelligence to select artists, curators or works for exhibitions? Within the network of chance is little space for authorial autonomy or sovereignty.
If artistic practice since Duchamp includes the selection of an object not made by the artist, we have to admit that the selection by algorithm or chance could create a new artwork too (e.g. Young, Mac Low (eds), 1963); it is entirely “autonomous”. There is a growing interest in artworks created by artificial intelligence, which was ‘trained’ on classical and modern images, mostly paintings. The results are not very convincing yet but appear to do well at auctions (artnet.com, frieze.com) The downside is that these algorithms are quite old, were already used by many people beforehand with similar results and were trained entirely on a diet of western art. How would the resulting products look if they were trained on the ethnographic museum, the natural history museum or the New York stock exchange? It is not hard to notice the difficulties – apart from all the racial bias backed into facial recognition or the automated ‘curators’ of Instagram et al., we just need to look at the dystopian reality of using artificial intelligence on the borders of the EU (theintercept.com; ec.europa.eu/) This work is based on psychological theories of “micro-expressions” by the “Paul Ekman Group” marketing theories developed by a psychologist of the same name. Ekman’s work has been widely criticized and discredited, but lives on in the dim corners of US police training courses and TSA programs. (nature.com).
VI.
Among other strange things on the Internet, Curatron is the name of an online curatorial platform operating selections for mostly Nordic residency programs, purporting to assist the self-selection of groups for residencies and exhibitions, without actually claiming to be an artist, or a curator. It calculates the “cohesion” of self-selecting groups within an online platform for portfolios of artists, placing emphasis on which combinations of artists appear in a group of selections together most often. Artists are invited to upload material all others can view and select during the selection period. It would certainly need further research to see how valid these selections actually have been so far and how artists can predict the works of other artists, say in an application for a residency and the exhibition with future works.
It is a very neat solution, side stepping the thorny issue of making actual judgements about any works of art. Instead it appears to process the communication/interaction between artists and interested curators, or at least anyone claiming to be one. In this case the bias seems to be buried in the fact that a self-selected group of people signals preferences, which style of works may have affinity together within a white cube. There is bias in favour of aesthetic judgements within an interested group, which could make such exhibitions tedious without any human intervention. It is obvious that processing the judgements of an online group will only re-enforce the bias of the group itself, even if it grows in diversity. It encourages deception, self-promotion and networking – a skillset just as necessary in the real (art) world. The question how more quirky, ephemeral, experimental, complex, innovative, challenging or provocative works would fare inside such an echo-chamber is impossible to judge.
VII.
As a modest proposal we suggest the use of algorithms to autonomously select appropriate works of art made by algorithms from the internet, in accordance with a title or subject matter selected by an algorithm fed with unrealised curatorial projects. Subsequently, someone should be able to provide us with an algorithm which could actually arrange all this work in a three-dimensional space, and hopefully we can find an algorithm which will write a meaningful review of this exhibition, so we don’t need to see it. To be validated as a work of art it just needs to have happened and been documented.
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