Peoples Republic of South Devon

Curator’s egg

May 14th, 2008

What possess galleries to come up with some of their crazy ideas? Pile of bricks indeed.

Art correspondent Phil Ginsberg went to a special seminar at Plymouth Arts Centre to find out more about curators

Off to Plymouth Arts Centre for a seminar on curating contemporary art entitled “Inter_connections”. Oh, the finesse of that underscore! Organised by the web based Curatorial Network, the PAC and that part of Plymouth University which deals with digital art and calls itself i-dat, the event surprised everyone by bringing a real star of the scene to town: Ute Meta Bauer, director of the Visual Arts Program [sic] at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cue the appearance of a fair percentage of the young curatorial who’s who of the Westcountry, plus a few students from Goldsmiths for good measure. Paula Orrell, PAC’s curator, responsible for its subtle, intelligent and fun current exhibition “Estrategia: Artists from Brazil”, welcomed us. Don’t miss this show, it’s on until 22 June.

First up was Basak Senova, who teaches at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. She recently had a residency at PAC and i-dat of which this seminar was the concluding event, but chose to speak about a different project. Fragments of difficult psychoanalytic theory drifted through her paper. Senova talked about an exhibition she had curated in which she had constructed look-alike corridors to connect different rooms and then darkened the entire space. The audience had been forced to rely on floor level red light and running LED displays for orientation. The unasked question in this was: how does a curator control their public?

Ute Meta Bauer began her talk with a plea to resist the commodification of precisely that term. She pointed out that a ‘public’ is always produced, never natural, similarly to ‘democracy’. A theme, merely implicit in Senova’s paper, began to emerge. Artists, Meta Bauer went on to claim, have significant cultural capital because they are able to transcend social barriers such as class or intergenerational divides. This fact, along with their exceptional ability to feel the nature of the zeitgeist and to reach different kinds of publics through different media, means they have a unique contribution to make. The problems we face today, Meta Bauer continued, are too complex to be solved by one discipline alone. Interdisciplinarity is key. At MIT, she showed us via the website zonesofemergency.net, artists work with architects and engineers on projects that oscillate between the gallery and the real world.

After our coffee break, during which the speakers had to submit to some truly mercenary networking, Paul O’Neill, research fellow at the University of the West of England, spoke on how he has tried to “undo” the gallery space as a curator. He had divided several of his exhibitions into different, very theoretical sounding parts. He called their physical exhibition space the background, their layout (sans art) the middle ground and the art itself the foreground. By reconfiguring these three he had tried to destabilise each exhibition. This is what curatorial theory can also be like: folded in upon itself. Where was the public here? Forgotten over a mere system of spatial configuration.

Compare for a moment: in 1985, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard organised a legendary exhibition at the Pompidou Centre called “Les Immatériaux” (“The Immaterials”). He used it to explore a set of philosophical research questions and was hypersensitive to the constructed nature of all aspects of the paradigm within which he worked. The conception of its huge maze-like floor plan was underpinned by a complex theoretical framework. Yet above all, as Lyotard wrote, he wanted to transform visitors into investigators. Everything about the exhibition only existed to lead its public to reflect upon much wider issues. This was art as research – something that Meta Bauer showed is still possible today. And it links to another point she mentioned, namely that no project is complete until its reception has taken place.

The American literary theorist Jonathan Culler suggests that what is now nicknamed ‘theory’ is that body of works that succeed in “challenging and reorienting fields other than those to which they apparently belong”. What the seminar really underscored was the desperate need for curatorial theory to take up that purpose.

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Entry Filed under: Arts