Curating.info

Welcome to February's Pick 'N Mix, my monthly annotated list of interesting tidbits that have captured my attention recently.

• I found this post about the "Video Vortex: Curating Online Video" symposium in Amsterdam really interesting, especially towards the end where there is this quotation: "...there was a short panel discussion about the role of the curator. [...] Hierarchies are changing and curators have to respond to those things. From the audience comes the remark that curators were the middle person between the artist and his audience. This position is threatened due to 2.0. Maybe it's a solution to look at the curator's role to help to rate and analyze the work. This would make a shift instead of being an audience seeker he would become an intellectual."


• "Who gets to tell the story?" is a great question that Rebecca Durkin asks on the Burke Museum blog. Ms Durkin expresses concern about photographs of Native Americans taken by a white person who "felt he was documenting a "vanishing" race" being displayed simultaneously alongside an exhibition of Native American artifacts and taped interviews. Ms Durkin says: "I'm excited to see the shows open this weekend and compare the stories the two shows are telling. Will This Place Called Home serve as a test of sorts for the authenticity of the images in Peoples of the Plateau? And how will the historic photos in Peoples of the Plateau inform the context with which we look at the cultural materials in This Place Called Home?" In this case, it seems that the Burke Museum is valiantly attempting to let more than one story be told at the same time, giving the viewing public some space to reach their own conclusions.


• There are some very critical and challenging statements being made in a text "Terminal Souvenirs: What is wrong with curatorial practise today" by Maia Damianovic, a critic and independent curator based in New York. The whole text is excellent reading, but I thought I'd excerpt some quotations that were very resonant for me.

  Too often, we can discern in current practice the insidious an implacable macula of conservative constraint trying to disguise itself behind critical, ideological and political posturing. Our theories and our practices, for the most part, simply do not match, Over and over again, we are confronted by didactic, pedagogic and formulaic curatorial mechanisms that glamorize a gamut of dull, dry or safe conceptual choices. Are the mechanisms surrounding curating so elaborately enshrined that we are confronted with a symptom of overwhelming conservatism, of being stuck in the pursuit of easy prescriptions, but also perks and rewards? In any case, curating today opens to a whole field of different investments, that seamlessly slip into the arena of politics, power and finances at the mercy of all their jumbled forces. But, politics and ideology can also become packaged commodities.

  Why are we so complicit? A transformation of curating and exhibiting today could amount to an ethical and political change of destination. A change of destination that would eschew comfort, self-gratification and success, and open itself to insecurity and anxiety; moving from protected to vulnerable contexts. lt could also move from pragmatics to poetics.

  A little confusion and chaos would work wonders. Why not swim against the current a little more; against the large survey show, 'against curating as a formula of success by default. Perhaps the curating and exhibiting of art today should be anxious, insecure practices.

  
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City Without Walls, (cWOW), New Jersey's oldest alternative art space, is seeking a curator for its third annual 1800Frames exhibit, which features recently produced, independent, non-commercial one-minute videos.

SCHEDULE. Show dates for 1800 Frames are December 7, 2006 - January 11, 2007. Curator selection and a call for work will be posted by mid-September. The curator's final selection of approximately 40 works and completion of a brief catalogue essay are due by late October.

CURATORIAL PROCESS. The curator is free to select any artist of their choosing. The curator is not required to select cWOW members, and selected artists are not required to become members. However, curators must review all member entries, and are encouraged to ask artists to join. This process ensures high-quality, independent selection, while also building our membership base, which provides crucial support for programming such as the 1800Frames exhibition.

EXHIBITION DETAILS. cWOW's gallery in downtown Newark is a state-of-the-art facility with over 1,600 square feet of exhibition space, including a main gallery, a project room, 9-foot screen, several flat-screen TVs, and other video projection equipment. Videos may also be made accessible through our website (http://www.cwow.org) and will be available as a tax-deductible premium compilation disc to support cWOW.

CONTACT. William Ortega, Gallery Director, City Without Walls, 6 Crawford
Street, Newark, NJ 07102-2412, tel 973.622.1188, fax 973.622.2941, William@cWOW.org,

Transmedia :29:59, the year-long programme of time-based art shown on a video billboard in Dundas Square in Toronto, is drawing to a close this month. It's been a fascinating and somewhat turbulent year. The year of programming on the board started off really nicely with a terrific launch event, where myself and Pierluigi Vecchi (VJ Fluid) VJ'd live to the billboard, and DJ Cyan and naw provided the live sonic scapes. It was really empowering and also technically fascinating (to see what worked and didn't work) sending images live to the board.

Curating for urban screens is a many-headed beast, though the inherent challenges only make the triumphs more sweet. Imagine asking artists to create very short pieces with no audio that must essentially be PG-rated and you can imagine how difficult it might be to both produce and find effective work for the board. And so, after the launch, the hard work began. Michael Alstad (the co-curator) and I are really proud of the choices we made, and strove to choose pieces for each month that connected, though they would never be presented one after another. What mattered to us was choosing videos from month to month that linked thematically or aesthetically, and that the overall programming on the board made sense.

As I mentioned earlier, the year wasn't without its turbulent moments, and from time to time we had to make some difficult choices. Clear Channel owns and operates the board that we have been using over the course of the year. Their requirements for content control were somewhat more stringent than our own, and more than once we had content returned to us with a directive to either change or replace the content. We had a choice to either work within their more strict guidelines or protest, and, in all likelihood, prematurely dissolve the contract with Clear Channel.

Dissolving the contract would have been a cowardly move. As with any other public presentation of creative work, many negotiations take place, and sometimes compromises have to be made. There are no free zones. It is very easy to paint the corporation as the "bad guy" in this and other cases, when in fact, artists are well acquainted with compromise and negotiation when it comes to presentation of their work, and deal with many requests made by curators, dealers, collectors, et cetera. Our situation was no different, where first of all the work has to appeal to us, the curators, and then secondly, the work must not in any way contravene Clear Channel's goals. It is that simple. Of course, sometimes Michael and I as curators try to push the envelope. The artists we have curated have handled requests for changes or new works with much intelligence, grace, and humour, which are all hallmarks of a truly creative spirit. In the end, we are offering a very unique venue to artists, we are proud of the programming we have shown, and we couldn't have done it without Clear Channel's generous assistance.

With all that said, and the year drawing to a close, I look forward to doing more curatorial work in this area and think that there is much to be discussed and learned from curating in this realm. For our final month, we're presenting two works that I'm really excited about. On the 28th minute of every hour, Collin Zipp's "Niverville, MB 08.04" is a gorgeous manipulated landscape. Collin physically defaces the videotape to produce unique effects that culminate in completely new landscapes. On the 59th minute of every hour, we present John Greyson's "14.3 seconds". During the 2003 war, U.S. planes bombed the Iraqi Film Archive. 14.3 seconds of celluloid were salvaged from the wreckage. If you slow them down by 23.8%, they last a minute. This poignant piece is not to be missed.

If you live in Toronto, check out the pieces in their natural habitat, on the pedestrian level billboard at Yonge-Dundas Square on the 29th and 59th minutes of the hour. If you don't, check out the pieces on the Transmedia :29:59 website.