Curating.info

IKT, the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art, held its annual congress in Helsinki and Tallinn from 23-26 April 2009.

IKT members from all over the world congregated in Helsinki and Tallinn for four days of intense activity. The congress participants visited Kiasma, the Ateneum, EMMA, Helsinki City Art Museum, Forum Box, the Cable Factory, FRAME, KUMU, and many more venues that were part of an optional gallery crawl on the first evening. The initial period of the Congress was spent in the beautiful Finnish capital, and was punctuated by a conference on the subject of "belonging and un-belonging". The Congress also travelled to Tallinn, taking in the Ars Fennica Award exhibition at KUMU, enjoying a lunch and continuation of the conference with presentations and a screening of "Monolith" by Kristina Norman (who represented Estonia at the Venice Biennale this year). After wrapping up with the annual General Assembly back in Helsinki at Kiasma, optional post-Congress activities began, composed of studio tours themed around media art, photography, and painting.

The conference programme featured papers from T.J. Demos, Kati Kivinen, Solvita Krese, Suzana Milevska, and Kristina Norman. The theme of "belonging and un-belonging" took many twists and turns: political, aesthetic, comical, academic. Perhaps the strongest response was generated in reaction to Kristina Norman's video, "Monolith", which depicted the relocation, by the Estonian government, of the statue of the Bronze Soldier from a very central location in Tallinn to a military cemetery a few kilometers away (which IKT members visited during our time in Tallinn!). The statue, which is a political firebrand, and its relocation caused passionate reactions in both the Estonian community and the local Russian community. Norman's work portrayed the situation with some humour (one sequence depicted the statue hurtling through outer space) and with distance: both the Estonians and the Russians were portrayed "equally badly" (paraphrasing here) in the quasi-documentary. This tension over this statue and what it represents meshed well with Solvita Krese's discussion of public art and monuments, highlighting the power of symbols in the public realm and their placement. The question then, of these symbols and their placement, and the work of artists and curators to create and situate these symbols, creates more questions in one's mind than answers, but proved to be an excellent frame for discussions around a subject as expansive as "belonging and un-belonging".

Aside from seeing a lot of interesting artwork, taking part in debates, and meeting new colleagues, there were several special moments. A very interesting whistlestop tour through several artists' studios at the Cable Factory culminated in a lovely dinner, lots of prosecco, and performances. I love Helsinki as a city, and savoured many personal moments, such as picking up a pastry at the Hakaniemi Market, trying to follow along with Finnish karaoke taking place at a local bar, and enjoying a dish of vorschmack at Cella with new and old friends. Of course it wouldn't be a logistically challenging trip involving hundreds of people without a surreal moment or two when difficulties arise. For example, a bit of confusion as some members were attempting to purchase tickets for the ferry to Tallinn was devolving into complete chaos until IKT Board Member Maria Lind magically appeared, gently commandeered the situation, and whisked us off to an quieter ferry terminal where departing ferries were miraculously quicker and cheaper. We had some lemons, and Maria made us some lemonade!

At the General Assembly, the board presented the financial situation of the past year and some discussions were had around future Congress locations, as well as requirements for members and the evolution of the IKT website. The IKT archive project is still ongoing (notably, a PhD student who is doing her dissertation on the history of IKT has been able to assist in this effort) and the board will continue to develop the archive into a real resource for the members and other researchers.

All in all, it was a wonderful opportunity to meet and interact with curators from around the globe, and the IKT membership looks forward to Athens next year, and Luxembourg and Metz the following year.

You can view my photos from the Congress here.

I attended this Congress because of the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Freelance curators enjoy a degree of flexibility in their work, but are often also in precarious positions when working with large organisations. A clear example of the difficulties faced by curators working in a freelance capacity emerged last week when the Koffler Centre of the Arts in Toronto issued a statement saying they were "disassociating" from artist Reena Katz, that they had commissioned through curator Kim Simon.

According to the statement, the core of the issue for the Koffler Centre, which is an agency of the United Jewish Appeal Foundation of Greater Toronto, is that artist Reena Katz publicly supports activities which reject "... the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state and promotes historically inaccurate comparisons between contemporary Israel and apartheid South Africa, in order to delegitimize Israel." The artist and curator dispute this interpretation of Katz's views.

The project has been under development for over a year and its launch is imminent. As the statement from the curator and artist put it, "...twelve days before the scheduled opening of a project involving over seventy participants, we attended the meeting. We were shocked to learn that the Koffler would be dissociating itself from Katz and our project solely on the basis of her political affiliations they said they had discovered on the Internet." That the organisation would choose to 'disassociate' itself at the eleventh hour is already indicative of a lack of professionalism, and the situation becomes even more perplexing once it is further noted that it is Katz's publcly-stated views that are the issue here, not the content of the commissioned project, which in fact uses Jewish culture as its bedrock and inspiration. The fact that Katz's views were uncovered on the web adds a twist to the tale as well (though again this is disputed by the curator and artist, who contend that the Koffler was aware of Katz's political leanings all along). The fact is that with the advent of web 2.0 and push-button web authoring, any artist or curator can make their views known on anything at any time, offering an unprecedented window on the ongoing fluidity of thought and personal opinion. The fact that this is essentially about Katz's personal digital traces underlines how unfortunate this turn of events has been, wherein an art centre would consider anything other than the work its business. The work, in effect, has been delegitimised here, subjugated to an attempt to pin down whether or not this artist's thoughts permit her to be legitimised by an established institution.

What can a freelance curator do in such a situation? Simon has stated that she is "appalled and heartbroken", and rightfully so. Without co-operation, courage, and support from within the organisation that was to present this work, the curator who is external to this structure has few options. Simon is doing all that she can to ensure that the show goes on, but the sudden lack of support from a well-resourced and branded institution is without a doubt an unwelcome and unhelpful development, that also then becomes a public example which might further dissuade curators from working freelance with large institutions (Simon is working freelance in this case, and is also employed as a curator for Gallery TPW).

It appears that the offer to fund the project fully still stands, so that it can still go ahead, which shields the Koffler from accusations of outright censorship and also from possible litigation. This action distills the problem to the core power struggle that freelance curators and independent artists face, because it's rarely ever about the money. Funding can be obtained without the intervention of an outside institution. The Koffler took something away that is far more valuable, and that's their seal of approval. Unfortunately for them, 'disassociation' in this case denies the rights that artists have to their own views, stifles debate on the subject in the Jewish community, and separates itself from what will surely be a wonderful project that celebrates Jewish culture and heritage in a historical district of Toronto.

Links:

Official project website: Each hand as they are called

Toronto Star story: Kensington Market exhibit stirs controversy among Jews

Globe and Mail story: Centre 'disassociates' itself from artist

Update (May 15, 2009):
Reena Katz and Kim Simon have issued a statement indicating that the exhibition will not open as it was scheduled to, due to the loss of the support of one of the project partners, following Koffler's disassociation. Katz and Simon will continue to work toward opening the exhibition at a future point in time. The latest updates are always available on the project website.

Increasingly open ways of participating in the selection and display of content are blossoming. Harnessing the ubiquity of internet access, the Brooklyn Museum are able to produce Click!, a "crowd-curated" photography exhibition. Weblogs, like FFFFOUND!, allow invited internet users to select pictures worthy of scrutiny from the tonnage of imagery available on the web. Taking the semi-randomness of allowing web users to filter content as a model, the Kemper Museum in Kansas City recently permitted museum visitors to choose items from the collection to be displayed in an exhibition entitled "Putting the U in Curator".

In each of these situations, the word curating is used to describe actions taken by members of the public who would not normally self-define as curators. This situation is similar to the one described by Clay Shirky in his recent book, Here Comes Everybody, about the definition of a journalist: "So long as publishing was expensive, journalists were rare." (p. 71) So long as there were relatively few museums and galleries, art curators were rare. On the surface, it appears that this rarity is eroding, not because of an explosion in curatorial jobs and projects, but because there is an explosion in the way the term is being used. "Curating" is increasingly being used to describe an expanding body of activity in terms of new platforms and materials, but remains focused on the act of the curator as editor or selector. This movement towards the application of the term curator to bloggers choosing images for their blogs, and to museum visitors who are invited to move a painting from the vault to the gallery wall, and to the person who votes on images in a web browser, expands the notion of a curator at the same time that it contracts it.

There are two distinct types of activity happening in this expanded area of definition. One is a singular act of temporary deputisation as a curator. This type of singular activity fits with the example of the Kemper Museum show, where one random museum visitor was selected to choose one piece from the collection, and then this same activity was repeated with a different museum visitor, until the walls were full. The other type of activity is a crowd-generated model, wherein group choices are tallied and a final result evolves from popularity of particular items, as in the Brooklyn Museum example. Both of these cases highlight the selection and editing processes that are part of a curatorial role.

Language is living and the meaning of words and expressions evolve over time and with use. There is no doubt that there is value to opening up and demystifying the editing and selection processes most typically known to be domain of the art curator. If this strategy is properly applied, it is possible to encourage anyone who is interested to develop a deeper aesthetic sense, to feel more closely linked to culture and heritage institutions, and to develop stronger ideas of what culture means to them. But if this is how the common use of the word curator is evolving, what is lost?

To speak very broadly, when looking at any collection of items, one can ask: "For what and for whom?" Why select, edit, and group things together? Collections and curated exhibitions are about creating links, developing narratives, and composing responses to perennial questions and ideas. These collections and groupings are then presented in ways so that they will effectively reach audiences. Often erroneously perceived as the skulduggery of the marketer, it is the work of curators and all cultural workers to perform extensive research on who is or could be the audience for a particular exhibit or collection, and what would constitute an effective display for this audience. Just as a priest isn't simply someone who says Mass and a doctor isn't simply someone who taps your knee with a hammer, a curator isn't just someone who selects images. The larger role of the curator encompasses the creation of links to other creative dialogues, writing and contextualising work, developing the physical (or virtual) exhibition sequencing and flow, and perhaps most important of all, nurturing a relationship with the practitioners who make the work and understanding the narrative inherent in their career trajectory. (Or, in the case of those who work with historical collections, having a scholarly background on the movements/time periods/artists represented in these collections). What can and will be lost in the reduction of the term curator to mean one who clicks on a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon is that sense of for what and for whom.

Is it possible to build a notion of for what and for whom into the singular model and the crowd model, and is that an appropriate aim? Or do these models serve the very specific purpose of magnifying the intricacies of these selection processes? I would argue that building larger cultural narratives, and developing clear intentions towards an audience are functions too important to ignore. Behind each of these very important additional tasks of the curator is an understanding of intentions and a burden of responsibility towards the public, artists, and colleagues.

Perhaps the intentions of those working with either old models or new are too divergent to reconcile. In interviews about the Brooklyn Museum crowd-curated exhibition Click! on artinfo.com, a photoblogger describes traditional modes of curating as about "judgment and exclusion" and that it allows "only a certain group of people to have their work seen", whilst a professional curator working in an institution characterises the crowd mode of curating as allowing people to act "less as curators and more as participants" and another curator described how the the exhibition might undermine the educational aspect of a museum's mandate.

In a very direct statement on the matter, blogger Jason Kottke says of his FFFFOUND! project: "I would argue that these sites showcase a new form of art curating. The pace is faster, you don't need a physical gallery or museum, and you don't need to worry about crossing arbitrary boundaries of style or media. Nor do you need to concern yourself with questions like "is this person an artist or an outsider artist?" If a particular piece is good or compelling or noteworthy, in it goes." Were these thoughts to be developed a little further, Kottke might have found that the terms "good", "compelling", and "noteworthy" are problematic, and the use of those terms in a cavalier way indicates a lack of consideration for who both the audience and the users are, or could be. In "Here Comes Everybody" Shirky also notes that: "As with the printing press, the loss of professional control will be bad for many of society's core institutions, but it's happening anyway. The comparison with the printing press doesn't suggest we are entering a bright new future - for a hundred years after it started, the printing press broke more things than it fixed, plunging Europe into a period of intellectual and political chaos that ended only in the 1600s." (p. 73). Will the notion of flexibility espoused by evangelists such as Kottke break more things than it fixes? It will certainly stretch, if not completely break, the definitions of noteworthy, good, and compelling, as well as curating.

In these open forums for participation, the very arbitrariness and randomness that is held up a virtue also ensures that there will never be a common vision or consensus on direction and intention. While this doesn't undermine the value of online or offline filtering by the public as an educational or research vehicle, it is erroneous to imagine it could take the place of a specialist waking up every day and asking "for what and for whom?" (before putting the "u" in curator). Rather than muddying our terms, the way forward is to identify and clarify what the purpose of singular or collaborative methods of filtering are, and refine how to make these methods more useful and meaningful to the participants.
--
Reference links:
(1) Brooklyn Museum, Click! http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click (Further information: http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/28147/power-to-the-people)
(2) FFFFOUND! Commentary:
http://www.kottke.org/07/10/ffffound-art-curating-for-the-masses
http://www.artfagcity.com/2007/10/29/art-curating-on-the-internet-meets-mediocrity/
(3) Kemper exhibition, Putting the U in Curator: http://www.kemperart.org/exhibits/UinCurator.asp
(4) Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody
--
This essay was included in the latest issue of Vague Terrain, guest edited by the fine folks at CONT3XT.NET.

IKT, the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art, held its annual congress in Montreal from 22-26 May 2008.

More than 130 members attended this year's IKT Congress, the first Congress ever to be held outside Europe. The days were very full, and included visits to major museums and galleries including the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montreal (MACM), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Dazibao, Galerie UQAM, Oboro, Vox, Galerie Clark, Fonderie Darling, and the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery. In each case, the director and/or curator of the institution was present to give us a personal introduction and tour. The mix of institutions provided a great overview of both the diversity of provision for artists and of the available exhibition spaces for curators in Montreal: artist-run centres, museums, studios, commercial galleries, university-affiliated galleries. The Congress also travelled to Quebec City, taking in the Manif d'Art, Musée National des Beaux-arts du Québec, and production centres housed at Méduse. Optional post-Congress activities included short visits to Ottawa and Toronto.

The event was hosted by Parachute, and Chantal Pontbriand and her team ensured that every detail of the visit was perfectly planned. Coaches were arranged to transport the delegates from place to place (which ensured we kept to our packed schedule), refreshments were delicious and abundant, and questions or requests were handled expertly. The hosts thoughtfully included a customized coach tour of the city that covered significant sites in Montreal such as the Expo '67 ruins on Ile Sainte-Hélène, the Habitat buildings, Mont-Royal, and more. When the tour stopped briefly near the summit of Mont-Royal, several curators took the opportunity to get an ice cream and enjoy the view, which was one of many lovely moments.

The timing of our visit was excellent, as it coincided with the inaugural Quebec Trienniale at the Musée d'Art Contemporain (which was a key feature on the schedule), and curators who could find a scant few minutes spare in the action-packed itinerary could also zip up to the Mile-End for the Ateliers Portes Ouvertes (APO) event. Timing was also perfect to sample some of the fruits of the labours of IKT candidates and members. The Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery was hosting Vincent Bonin's exhibition about artists as cultural workers entitled Documentary Protocols II, and also Conceptual Filiations, curated by Michèle Thériault. Louise Déry curated Phenomena at Galerie UQAM, and Marc Lanctôt was part of the team behind the Quebec Triennale at MACM. It was enormously satisfying to see and support the hard work of one's colleagues during the Congress.

Interaction between local artists and the visiting curators was incorporated as an integral part of the Congress. A magnificent evening meal at the Fonderie Darling evolved into a lovely party, and also provided ample opportunity for the IKT members and guests to visit the artists who work at the Fonderie in their studios. As well, curators were able to request meetings with local artists, which were arranged by the Parachute team. These intimate meetings, which consisted of a handful of curators and the artist, were a terrific way for the Congress attendees to delve a little deeper and learn more about specific artists that piqued their interest.

A conference on art and economy was led by Mirjam Westen and included contributions from Jo-Anne Kane, Nina Montmann and Louise Neri. This short conference addressed some of the salient issues involved in the intersection of the fine art world and commercial concerns. A heated question and answer period followed, and the presentations sparked conversations throughout the rest of the Congress.

At the General Assembly, the board presented the financial situation of the past year and decisions were made regarding future Congress locations. It was decided that Congress will be hosted in 2010 by Athens, and in 2011 by Luxembourg and Metz. At last year's Congress, it decided that the 2009 Congress will be held in Helsinki and Tallinn. The board also issued a general request to assist in gathering documentation and information about the early years of the IKT association with a view to creating an IKT archive. The board intends to develop the archive into a significant resource and research tool, documenting nearly forty years of history.

The hospitality and collegiality on offer at the 2008 IKT Congress was truly exemplar, and everyone very much looks forward to Helsinki and Tallinn in 2009. If you have materials to contribute to the IKT archive, particularly of the early years of the association, please get in touch with IKT through the "contact" page on their website.

Astria Suparak, a US-based curator, noted in a recent public letter that her role as a "citizen and as a curator is to enrich the communities in which I live and work, through engaging, exciting, and relevant creative work." I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly, and I'd also add that taking these actions involves an intimate knowledge of the context that one occupies and a willingness to take calculated risks. It should also be further noted that very often, curators do not work independently, and therefore institutions that employ curators are bound to support these creative risks if they truly desire to engage in a dynamic discourse around contemporary art.

Suparak was the Director of the Warehouse Gallery at Syracuse University, until she was dismissed from her post on September 30, 2007. Her supervisor, Jeffrey Hoone, Executive Director of the Coalition of Museum and Art Centers (CMAC), said the reason for her dismissal was that the gallery was being "restructured".

According to the New York Times:

Carole Brzozowski, the dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, said the content of gallery shows organized by Ms. Suparak had nothing to do with her dismissal. But people in the arts at Syracuse, including university art teachers, asserted that the ouster was related to risk-taking or innovative exhibitions she organized since becoming the director last year.

Ms. Suparak said of Mr. Hoone: "My aesthetic is very different from his. I'm interested in street art, riot grrl and D.I.Y. aesthetics." A sign at the entrance to the gallery's current show, "Come On: Desire Under the Female Gaze," reads, "This exhibition contains work generally intended for mature audiences." Ms. Suparak said it was posted at Mr. Hoone's behest.

The case of Ms. Suparak's dismissal posits very serious questions vis à vis some basic aspirations and assumptions about creative curatorial practice. As an example, in a recent interview with curator Sarah Cook, the interviewer asks (and I'm paraphrasing quite a bit) about what conditions would be considered nurturing for a curator. (The interviewer, Régine Debatty, asks specifically: "What are the conditions required to achieve "upstart media bliss"?") Ms. Cook responds: "Challenging the system - be it the art system, the museum, or the format of the exhibition - and not being afraid to take a risk (generally being an upstart). At the same time, remembering to take care of the artist and the work, take care of other people and your ethics. Creating situations for contemplation and reflection (bliss doesn't have to be monumental, it might only last a minute, but a minute worth remembering)."

I think that this quotation from Ms. Cook says it best - what better way to achieve bliss than to challenge the system, take risks, and yet simultaneously remain steadfast to your standards. In an institution where the curator has to answer to management, it is imperative that management support the sort of calculated, intelligent risks a professional curator would make. If Ms. Suparak's case is as it seems based on the available evidence, it appears that there was a failure in this relationship - this commitment to producing catalytic moments and entry points for dialogue in contemporary art, by making moves that are not always "safe". These failures are worrying, as they don't bode well for the continued enrichment of cultural experience - which means everyone, not just the curators involved, loses out.

I've noted of late that the term "open source" gets bandied about quite a bit, not just in technology-related industries, but also increasingly in the art world. To be sure, some systems in the art world, including curatorial processes, are very open and transparent. Is it stretching it a bit, however, to relate this transparency and receptivity in the art world to the "open source" movement, a crusade mostly associated with software that you can download for free and possibly manipulate before sharing your evolution of the product with others?

Open source (appropriately, as defined by Wikipedia) "...is a set of principles and practices that promote access to the design and production of goods and knowledge. The term is most commonly applied to the source code of software that is available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent intellectual property restrictions. This allows users to create software content through incremental individual effort or through collaboration."

OK, so that's our basic definition. The Wikipedia article goes on to state: "The open source model of operation can be extended to open source culture in decision making, which allows concurrent input of different agendas, approaches and priorities, in contrast with more centralized models of development [...] ." If we agree with this, that does seem to answer our question about the use of the term - it can be applied as a model to nearly anything. What, then, have been the interesting examples of late that cause me to go trawling on Wikipedia for definitions of open source? Let's look at them one by one:

Continue reading "Open Source Curating"

Recently I was the invited respondent to GLOBAL BENDING: Opening Creative Space - Rooting Curatorial Media Practice in China panel at the Dutch Electronic Art Festival. This panel was expansive in scope and ambitiously attempted to cover many topics.

After a brief introduction from moderator Li Zhenhua, we heard from Zhang Ga, proposing that a top-down strategy is a sensible one to utilise in the current climate in China. Zhang Ga noticed that many Chinese educational institutions were employing outmoded notions of what was "new media" or "digital", relying on digital photography and video to carry their programmes. He stressed the importance of professionalisation, and setting up a high-level discourse in the field to advance practice. He noted that China lacks a culture of "tinkerers" - practitioners hacking in their garages. With this in mind, and also acknowledging that government initiatives are focusing on digital applications in entertainment rather than art, the role of higher education becomes incredibly important.

Next, Yao Bin described the DIY process by which the community built an art space, using simple materials. He rhymed off a very impressive list of embassies and consulates that he had worked with to present work in the space. He also spoke about a sound art exchange project that he did with Taiwanese artists, something that might be seen as a bit of a political hot potato.

Ellen Pau spoke next, mostly referring to art as cultural practices, not as processes that necessarily result in objects. She described several projects that took place outside the white cube, including the "Community Museum Project", which allowed indigenous creativity to flourish. She also noted the planned transformation of West Kowloon in Hong Kong into a new "cultural quarter".

Wei Zhang from Vitamin Creative Space spoke about several projects, though the one that intrigued me the most was "China Tracy", a project by Cao Fei that involved use of a Second Life avatar for art purposes.

Davide Quadrio, Director of Biz Art in Shanghai, then spoke very critically about the challenges facing curators in China. He indicated that there was a lack of a truly critical approach, and also that there was a lack of sustainable development for significant projects. He stated that the problem of economical and cultural independence was still one to be solved.

I began my response by structuring it into a few phases: "Approaches and Strategies", "Policies and Politics", and "Curatorial Concerns". Beginning with approaches and strategies, I noted that a top-down versus botton-up approach will help you to meet in the middle, and that the middle space is one that curators often occupy, as negotiators between artists and institutions. Zhang Ga's work setting a foundation in terms of higher education seems very critical to future success, bringing things up to date through institutions in a top-down way that is innovative and essential. I wondered if it might be innovative in an economic sense as well, since positioning art practice as research in an academic context might be one way to fundraise for the arts.

Approaching culture from the angle of urban culture is something that came up in several presentations - Ellen Pau telling the audience about the street as museum, Zhang Ga speaking of the difficulties with public art, and Yao Bin describing the symposium of urban culture that he set up in his space. I noted that whilst having complete autonomy to install public art at will is unlikely anywhere, digital artists and curators are especially well-positioned to create a "virtual layer" of information over the city. Also the talk of new cultural quarters was interesting - West Kowloon and other places - since surely there are funds to be tapped there, and perhaps curators can take their place at the negotiation table when these arrangements are being made. Not forgetting, of course, that a whole other sort of "public space" that desperately needs a "cultural quarter" is opening up - Second Life - so curatorial interest in it, and projects like "China Tracy" are very welcome additions to this developing scene.

In "Policy and Politics", I mused on whether the "creative industry" policy being pushed by the government couldn't also be utilised by curators. There is no public funding for art in China (though other governments seem willing to step in, as Yao Bin's long list of participating embassies proved), but getting art "sneaked in" the back door under the category of research and development, product testing, et cetera, might be a way of manipulating this strategy. Yao Bin's work with Taiwanese artists highlighted the other, perhaps polar opposite of art-as-research tendency, that of art as an active instrument for creating political goodwill.

It's a delicate dance with government policies, not just in China but worldwide, though some announcements in China keep people on their toes - such as the revelation from Ellen that the public broadcaster in Hong Kong might be destroyed and re-created. These rumours, proposals, and inevitably, final decisions, end up affecting artists and curators either directly or indirectly by creating a sense of uncertainty that Davide Quadrio summed up nicely as "unsustainable sustainable".

In terms of curatorial concerns, I observed that curators in China are genuinely caught in the middle, negotiating between artist, institution, sponsors, and government. In addition, there is the pressure of making a big impression - Ellen Pau spoke of audiences and supporters both wanting "fireworks", meaning, something that is spectacular and that lives in the moment, freeing cultural actors from bearing the burden of future maintenance, but also crippling sustained dialogue. In the absence of funding and in the era of the "unsustainable sustainable", what options remain? Can curators gain influence and a foothold into funding sources through an academic or political context, or is that too great a compromise? What can be done to induce a tinkering culture, a culture which could become essential to feeding the Chinese media arts scene? Can the rise of the "creative industries" and "cultural quarters" be exploited to insert a curatorial agenda? One thing that I was certain of, walking away from this panel, was that the people on it were leading in decoding the answers to these difficult questions.

"What Do Curators Want?" was the name of an event held recently at Side Street Projects (an art centre in Pasadena, California, USA) featuring Caryn Coleman, editor of art.blogging.la and owner of sixspace.

The promotional blurb stated:

If you go about this the wrong way, you can kill your career before it even happens. So, how do you approach curators without shooting yourself in the foot? Caryn Coleman, owner of sixspace and editor of art.blogging.la, will give you some practical advice in this free, public presentation...

They have also put Caryn's notes online, which are available in PDF format.

I was drawn to read about this event for several reasons, not the least of which was wondering how an expansive question such as "What do curators want?" would be answered. Caryn's excellent tips for artists will be very useful to those who are pursuing a relationship with a commercial gallery. It's good to see that the question was focused to cater to the needs of the local audience and the expertise of the speaker.

It did cause me to wonder what the PDF tip sheets would look like for curators with other concerns. What are the relevant parameters between artists and curators when in contexts such as the museum, the non-profit gallery, or festivals?

If pressed, I suppose I would say that one of my favourite things about art openings is the conversations that take place - since usually the room is too full to really appreciate the art.

Recently I was at an opening in a white cube and ended up chatting to the curator of the show, whose name I usually recognise as an artist. Fuelled by cheap cabernet, I peppered her with questions about how the show came about, why she was trying her hand at curating, etc. Her answer was fascinating in its simplicity: she wanted to curate this show because she was frustrated that the work had toured all over the world, but not shown in the artists' backyards.

I smiled and said something charming enough to keep her talking to me for the next few minutes, and then reflected on what she said quite closely afterward. I found it fascinating - her taking on this mantle of curator that she really wasn't interested in, out of necessity, because the work that she wanted to see simply wasn't being shown.

Her response reminded me a little bit of the DIY curators in Seattle that I blogged about, who were frustrated by being kept out of the system, and therefore began working in a host of different sites to satisfy their desire to present the work that they wanted to see. Once I had compared this reluctant curator's response to the situation of self-identified curators who don't have a white box venue to work in, it occurred to me that their motivations were extremely similar. Don't curators curate because they want to see the work they are bringing in? Because no one else is doing it? Because they think it is important that a certain group of people see a certain set of works? So important, in the case of the Seattle DIY-ers, that they will do it anywhere. So important, in the case of my reluctant curator, that she will step out of her role as an artist to just make it happen.

By force or by choice, some of the fundamental motivations behind curating an exhibition seem the same.

I'm proud to announce the (semi-recent) launch of my latest curatorial effort.

In-Site Montreal is a collection of site-specific art presented on the portal pages of five wireless internet hotspots in the Ile Sans Fil network. Artists Nicolas Fleming, Maria Legault, and Virginie Laganiere have created art works that can be viewed simply by logging in to the Ile Sans Fil network at the selected hotspots. Though the project is best viewed in-situ, you can also view the works produced by the artists for the hotspot locations at the In-Site Montreal micro-site.

I have produced a curatorial text for the project, which I would be grateful for your feedback on, my cherished readers.

The concluding paragraphs of the essay include the following statements:

The virtual spaces that In-site Montreal inhabit are amorphous areas around several accepted gathering places such as cafes, galleries, markets, and bars. They are perhaps places where as an internet user, you may intend to use the opportunity of connectivity to the network to look outward, to read news of distant places or connect with friends far away through e-mails and online social networking sites. The art practice of telematics in particular addresses the creative possibilities when two parties are connected over distance to communicate. In some way, the pieces presented on the portal pages of Ile Sans Fil's network as part of the In-Site Montreal project present something that is almost anti-telematic, in that the works look inward rather than outward. In the case of this project, a connection to someone across the globe is not sought, it is shunned in favour of a further examination and rumination on the details of the local environment.

I'm interested in this idea of the inverse-telematic, the inward-looking, the intensely-local, especially using a tool such as Wi-Fi that we are so accustomed to associate with an outward-looking, nearly-anonymous roaming of virtual terrain.

Thanks to Year Zero One for producing the project, the Canada Council for the Arts for funding the project, Ile Sans Fil for hosting the project, and Rita Godlevskis for designing the map and visual identity of In-Site Montreal.

The terms "curator" and "curating" are being slung around in a wide variety of contexts these days, mostly to do with the curator-as-filter. It is intriguing to see a term that is usually used in a fine arts context to be used in other contexts (in the three cases I mention below: the Web, interior decorating, and metadata) though it can sometime feel as though the word is being appropriated because there is no other term to describe precisely what is going on.

One of the first items like this that caught my eye was an article by Suw Charman on Strange Attractor that I quite enjoyed.

But we don't need gatekeepers anymore. We don't need people who stand between us and our stuff, deciding what to tell us about and what to ignore. We don't need arbiters of taste. [...] What we need are curators. And we need them badly. [...] Curators already exist. Some are people: Bloggers who sift through tonnes of stuff in order to highlight what they like, and who, if you have the same taste as them, can be invaluable to discovering new things to like. Some are aggregators: Site that gather lots of little bits of stuff and present them in aggregation and help us find the bits that the majority find to be good. Some are algorithms: recommendation systems and search.

As I mention earlier, it seems that we need a new word to accurately describe what is involved in filtering and dissecting content for other users of the internet. Is creating a focused list of links curating? Blogging photos of random things - is that curating? Perhaps it is to an extent, but at this time, the role and host of skills that the word "curator" summons to my mind seems a bit flattened when used to describe the function of someone I would call a "filter" (though that sounds quite impersonal and awful - hence I am proposing that a new word needs to be created) would be.

Next, an article that mildly horrified me for its use of the word curating:

For hourly fees generally ranging from $50 to $250, these microdesigners, known in the trade as rearrangers or accessorizers, will regroup the potted plants in the foyer, style the paperweight collection on the coffee table, create vignettes of country-style baskets atop kitchen cabinets or spruce up the presentation of the family china.

With me so far? People who will re-arrange the potted plants in the foyer are "microdesigners". Probably nice, inoffensive work if you can get it. Later in the article however, the c-word crops up:

For Jennifer Wong, 39, the owner of a consulting firm in Portland, Ore., not having to think about the details is "pure bliss." Ms. Wong, whose home is decorated with mid-century furniture, recently enlisted the services of Martie Accuardi, who calls herself a microdesigner and charges $75 an hour, to curate her mantelpiece. Not only does Ms. Accuardi style her client's existing decor, she augments it with pieces she brings in from her small home store. As part of her service, every few months she swaps out the old accessories and brings in new ones, adding seasonal accents.

I was gobsmacked to see that it was possible to curate a mantelpiece. I wonder in this case, if the word actually came out of Jennifer Wong's mouth and was used by the author of the piece but not directly quoted, or if the author of the piece was using her thesaurus and that is how she came up with the concept of the curated mantelpiece.

Playing devil's advocate with myself for a moment, perhaps there is some simplification going on, but the basic function of a curator is to select and choose work - so selecting and choosing items for inclusion in someone's home could be curation. Or again, is what we are talking about here simply filtering? In the first case, filtering scores of links on the web, in the second case, filtering a host of choices at the home decor shop.

Finally, curation comes up on Anil Dash's blog when he loses the metadata associated with his iTunes song library. For him the information that surrounds each song is nearly as important as the song itself, because without that context, he notes that they are no longer his songs. He goes on to say: "Art without curation or creation without witness leaves a work mute."

To that sentiment, it is easy for me to rustle up an "Amen".

Dear readers,
I hope everyone had a restorative and happy holidays.
I'm still easing myself into the new year, and so will make the first entry for 2007 on this blog a lighthearted one.

I propose getting back into (a certain sort) of curatorial headspace by downloading "Curator Defense", a game by David Howe. (It appears to be for PC only).

gHacks describes the game as such:

Pieces of art invade the museum and you have to stop them to prevent them from replacing the master pieces in your museum. It sounds pretty silly but it is actually tremendous fun. You have to place certain structures to slow down and destroy the art that is invading the museum.

The storyline sounds really fun (and perhaps even a bit familiar, to some of us!):

As the longstanding curator of a Museum of Fine Arts, it is your duty to protect the sanctity of its works. Your benefactors stubbornly believe that modern art does not belong in your museum; as your paycheck comes from them, you must uphold their wishes. An association of local curators known as MARTIA (Modern ART Is Art), on the other hand, feels that your museum should reflect a more balanced representation of the art world. [...] Word has reached your museum that tonight is the night MARTIA plans to coordinate a stream of seemingly endless waves of their modern art against your store room. Should any of their work reach your store room, your brain-dead staff will place MARTIA's art on your walls.With an arsenal of their defensive gizmos and gadgets at your side, you should be able to defend your museum. Prevent this attack on your museum from ruining your career; grab your thinking cap and get the job done!

Let me know what you think of the game in the comments.
Happy curating in 2007!

Recently, I spotted a CNN story about the Louvre "inviting slam poets in to rap about paintings". In what was surely conceived as a PR-double whammy (bring in a celebrity, create a programme that appeals to youth/urban hipsters), Toni Morrison has been invited to be a guest curator this month.

The American Nobel laureate has helped the Louvre conceive a series of lectures, readings, films, concerts, debates and slam poetry that will continue through November 29. All center around her theme "The Foreigner's Home," touching on national identity, exile and the idea of belonging.

Inviting Morrison to the museum was part of Louvre Director Henri Loyrette's outreach to the United States. [...] Loyrette, who took over at the 213-year-old institution in 2001, also has been trying to shake up France's perceptions of the role of museums. "A museum for me is not just a place, it's a place for education, a place with a social role," he said.

I've heard the term "celebrity curator" tossed around quite a bit, and usually with derision. I found this move by the Louvre (rhyming intentional) to be fairly benign, however. It seems part of a larger attempt on the part of the Louvre to fill the social role that Loyrette refers to.

The larger notion of the "celebrity curator" is far more dangerous than the Louvre example I'm citing here. The rather serious role of cultural arbiter that the curator plays ensures that there is an inevitable aura of power and, subsequently, the potential for sexiness that is congruous with the idea of celebrity, but we have to be careful: that power should also not be misused. Hence, while the Louvre's move as it stands is respectable on several levels, even though Morrison is not a formally-trained curator (she has other cultural credentials), I would cringe at handing over a similar role to most actresses or pop musicians. They have cultural credentials of a sort, too, and could expand the audience of a museum, but the danger here is a dilution of a museum's mission to the point of incomprehensibility.

Morrisson's work at the Louvre has also been reported on at the New York Times (much more in-depth article than the CNN story).

Tom Moody brings two examples of the phenomenon of anonymity to our attention in a recent blog post.

Tom first discusses a recent example of the Schirn Kunsthalle's "Anonymous" show, wherein the artists and the curator are anonymous. This example is not as interesting for me as it could be, since at the end of the show the identities of the artists and the curator will be revealed. Rather anti-climactic, since after the show, will it have the same impact? I suppose it depends on the work, as always.

Tom cites an earlier example of the same concept:

Harlem's Triple Candie gallery also did an "anonymous" series in 2004 and 2005, consisting of two shows by artists whose identities won't be revealed (ever, according to co-gallerist Peter Nesbett.) The curatorial intent was essentially the same--"reaction to pernicious branding of artists in the contemporary art world"--although Triple Candie framed it more thoughtfully as an issue of "how biography informs interpretation." The shows weren't obscure: one was reviewed by Ken Johnson in the New York Times and the gallerists mentioned them in an interview they gave in Flash Art interview in this summer.

Escaping how "biography informs interpretation" is one thing, but it then leaves one wondering about the flipside of this problem - where is the accountability? Nothing creates accountability like putting your name to something.

The problem is actually bigger and harder to unpick than that simple set of diametric opposites I just proposed. For example, it is sometimes the case that curators at large institutions are simply part of staff and their name isn't necessarily attached to each piece of collateral that is released pertaining to a particular exhibition. In that case, it might be a bit harder to find the information, but usually with a bit of digging one can make an educated guess which person on staff it was.

Curatorial collectives pose a similar ambiguity - the information is there, but it remains slightly obscured who did what, who exactly chose a particular artist, etc. I've participated in a number of co-curatorial situations where the internal methods we used were not explained to prospective artists in the shows, and perhaps that lack of transparency chafed. I'm not sure.

I think that the bottom line for me is that as I study these examples, I'm finding that I like a transparent approach more and more. There is something very appealing about being able to put a face, name, and background to decisions. Biography does inform interpretation, perhaps, but isn't context such as biography an essential part of the puzzle? Or, as Sally McKay noted in the comments on Tom's post, it is important "to follow the development of one indvidual's practice as an evolving project". I think that a long-term narrative in one's practice is something to strive for, and that potential narrative is undercut by anonymity and obfuscation of roles.

Seth Godin is a marketing guru who has published numerous books and has an excellent blog. I'm not a marketer nor a businessperson with a product to sell, but I read his blog anyways because I find the underlying psychology of marketing to be quite interesting. In the end, it's all about how people relate to people, a topic that should interest anyone who has to interact with people on a daily basis (which is probably 99% of us).

Usually the content on his blog is relevant to me on this fundamental level of human psychology, not as a curator or arts administrator directly. In one of his recent posts, however, Godin has some direct critiques for curators at museums:

I think in every single case, what keeps museums from being remarkable:

a. the curators think the item on display is the whole thing. As a result, they slack off and do less than they should in creating an overall story

b. they assume that visitors are focused, interested and smart. They are rarely any of the three. As a result, the visit tends to be a glossed over one, not a deep one or a transcendent one

c. science museums in particular almost beg people NOT to think.

I can't remember the last time a museum visit made my cry, made me sad or made me angry (except at the fact that they don't try hard enough).

Definitely some food for thought in there, though probably echoes of criticisms we are all well aware of. Godin wraps the post by saying:

The takeaway for me is that in fact the issues of storytelling and remarkability and respect are universal, whether you're a non-profit or a job-seeker. It's all people, all the time.

This is true, and why it is relevant for curators and arts administrators to look to other disciplines, like marketing, for new approaches from time to time.