How to do things with curatorship / step 3

step #3 : don’t be a snob

#3


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how to do things with curatorship

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'I grew up in New York City, a place with a great access to many museums and cultural events. When I travelled around the country, I found my experience wasn’t the norm, and I became obsessed with how to bring rich encounters to other places and people’ (Thea 2009: 20). This testimony by pioneer socially engaged curator Mary Jane Jacob represents one of art’s biggest challenges as a tool for wide social influence – the elitist barrier.

One of Mary Jane Jacob’s first attempts to bring art to the people was The Michigan Artrain exhibition in 1975. A six-car train travelled the countryside of United States stopping in each town for a week. Jane Jacob at the time was a student on an intern-ship. Her curatorial purpose was to make art more accessible and she chose the travelling format to do that, an innovative strat-egy for that time. In terms of the development of socially engaged curatorship, Jane Jacob recalls that in the 1970s in the United States there was a feeling of a ‘ripe moment for ushering in new

"The best dialogues I have are with people who don’t have art degrees, those without preconceptions about art... they will often say “I don’t know anything about art,” but then find themselves talking about art in ways that are very meaningful’ — Mary Jane Jacob


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audiences to participate in what had been considered an elitist experi-ence’. Jane Jacob later became famous also for inclusive strategies working with artists outside the mainstream. In her curatorial choices she promoted women, emerging artists, diasporic communities and experimental media (Thea 2009: 20). The Artrain mobile museum that gave her the first experience of socially engaged curatorship is still traveling around the country (www.artrainusa.org).

WARNING! EVEN THOUGHT THE TERM ‘EXHIBITION-MAKING’ IS ALMOST A SYNONYM TO ‘CURATORSHIP’, THE FORMAT OF EXHIBITION IS FAR FROM BEING YOUR ONLY WAY OF CURATORIAL PRACTICE

You must keep that elitist barrier in mind when you try to do things with curatorship. Many curators do that by breaking from the institu-tional exhibition format (like Mary Jane Jacob did in 1990s with her community projects). Exhibitions are one of the first things that come into the conversation when you try to explain to those who are not familiar with the term what curatorship is. Curating does not neces-sarily mean exhibition-making, it can be practiced in many other formats: creating platforms, organising events or meetings, interven-tions, publications or games. In this step you will find various inspir-ing curatorial projects that have opened up endless possibilities of curatorial spaces, formats and participants.


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WHY TO DO THINGS WITH EXHIBITIONS

You should consider an exhibition as a format carefully with the meanings it brings, that are not neutral as it might seem. The exhibition format is being questioned today also in conservative art circles for its old-fashioned form of presenting art. Exhibitions seem to not catch-ing up with the innovation development in the art making practice (Hoffnann and Aranda 2008: online; von Hantelmann 2010: 10-11).

The elitist image of the institutional exhibition format, as described in Mary Jane Jacob’s testimony, makes big parts of the public feel intimidated by museums and this reality must be acknowledged by you (Rabens, 2011: online). This makes it hard for an exhibition (and its associated space of a museum or a gallery) to be socially engaged. An effort needs to be done to bring the audience to the gates of the institution in the first place. If you are interested in using curator-ship as a tool for social change, consider if that task would be easier achieved outside the exhibition format, or at least outside the institu-tional exhibitions.

HOW TO DO THINGS WITH EXHIBITIONS

On the other hand, their unique place in society grants exhibi-tions in general, and institutional exhibitions in particular with their strength. And you can use it if it suits your curatorial purpose. Exhibi-


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tions in general, and international mega-exhibitions like the Venice Biennale in particular, serve as laboratories for artistic experi-mentation and exchange (Thea 2009: 7). They also provide a rare space in privatising societies that is autonomous (to some extent) from the democratic market logic. In today’s consumer socie-ty some museums still remain as non-profit-driven sanctuar-ies, like schools and hospitals used to be before privatisation; and exhibitions act as publicly open non-commercial cultural events.

The World Press Photo is an example of curatorial doing strat-egy in the format of exhibition. The yearly travelling international exhibition of photo-journalism is aiming for audiences larger than the museum goers. The exhibited artists are chosen by the Dutch founda-tion in a contest, open to independent photographers as well as those representing news publications. The prize-winning photographs are assembled into an exhibition that travels to dozens of countries over the course of a year. According to their site, over two million people go to a hundred different venues to see the same images. The exhibi-tion serves the curatorial purpose of creating a united humankind

Exhibitions in general, and international mega-exhibitions like the Venice Biennale in particular, serve as laboratories for artistic experimentation and exchange


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experience that is expressed in the content (images taken in various parts of the world by photographers from many different countries) and in the way it is communicated (the travelling exhibition where a visitor in Moscow sees the same exhibition as a visitor in Tel Aviv, and they both are aware of that globalising context, like McDonalds (worldpressphoto.org and my correspondence with the foundation).

You can learn from the The World Press Photo example also how to use the format of the ‘good old exhibition’ to do another thing with curatorship – it is honouring photojournalism as an artistic medium. Because form of expression is naturally found in cheap and dispos-

WORLD PRESS PHOTO EXHIBITION IN LONDON


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able newspapers, a curatorial decision to present news photographs in an exhibition gives photojournalism a stamp of higher art.

CHOOSE THE RIGHT SPACE

When you try to be inclusive in your curatorial doing, remember that the space where your curato-rial project is held is not a separate real-estate related decision, but an important extension of the core of the project. By approaching it as an extension – you should try choos-ing the space that expresses the intentions of the project and the values behind it.

Don’t go searching for gallery spaces automatically, but stop to think which space will suit your purpose in the best way. It does not necessarily have to be an official ‘art space’. It doesn’t even need to be a defined or physical space. Remember that spaces come with various associations that you must be aware of and use in the benefit of your purpose. A space gives artwork a context and contributes to its meaning.

stop to think which space will suit your purpose in the best way. It does not necessarily have to be an official ‘art space’. It doesn’t even need to be a defined or physical space


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The meaning of space when curating art is well illustrated by The Washington Post experiment in 2007. The famous violin musician Joshua Bell performed in a Metro station while hundreds of pedestri-ans ignore him. Usually Bell’s concerts are sold out, but here very few stopped to listen to him for free (Weingarten 2007: online). They were affected by the space of the performance, not expecting ‘good’ music in the public. Bell’s experiment highlights how no space is meaning-free and reminds you to be fully aware of the ‘baggage’ that comes with spaces/locations.

At the same time museums and galleries do play an important role in conserving art as heritage and stimulating its production. They just have a certain image that needs to fit to the project’s aim. If you are an institution-based curator, working for a museum or a gallery, ask yourself what would be the best use of that space and its meanings. Artist JR, for example, treats the world as his gallery. He mainly chooses to exhibit his photographs on the streets and other locations that are chosen to reveal the meaning of the pictures he posts. He does exhibit also in cultural institutions, but only when they can provide him an added value to the project (Foam 2007: online).

An added value of an art institution to a curatorial project can by validating something as fine art, just like The World Press Photo you can give a non-conventional artwork a status of fine art. The South African National Gallery, for example, uses its status as an authority on local fine art to ‘validate’ works that did not necessarily get the


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JR, INSIDE OUT PROJECT IN PALESTINE STREET AND HONG KONG GALLERY


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‘fine art’ stamp during the apartheid regime. In 2005, for example, the Gallery held beads art exhibition (Intsimbi Beadwork from South Africa). That is an aware curatorial use of a space and its meanings.

Spaces that express exclusivity, whether by image or by charging entrance fees relate to a wider perception of public. That is expressed well by Borland in his essay about semi-public spaces, like shopping malls, where the right of admission is always reserved: ‘we have a choice – to work towards shaping a public in which we feel comfortable sharing the same space, or to further fragment the public with spaces designed to exclude and blinker’ (2004: 38). As a curator that wishes to do things for the society, you have the choice to work towards shaping a public in which you feel comfortable sharing the space.

A LESSON FROM STREET ARTISTS

You will find that today more than ever before there is openness, and even trendiness, for ‘surprising’ spaces for curatorial projects (Obrist, 2010: 96). Street artists who are today accepted into commer-cial galleries and museum collections represent an interesting, almst paradox, context for discussing space, institutions and their meaning as a validation for fine art. A street artist can exhibit and sell in well-known galleries and at the same time be blamed for violence and vandalism by the police and the public (Marrett, 2004: 39). Funny enough, while the ‘public’ or ‘art-world’ will call the gallery piece


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art before the street pieces, the graffiti artists themselves many times say that the gallery part in their careers is only there for income, and that their ‘real’ art is on the streets (based on interviews that I have conducted with street artists in 2013, including Tel Aviv based Know Hope and Maya Gelfman, and Cape Townian Freddy Sam).

FROM MY EXPERIENCE

I have faced this challenge when I decided to execute my project The OBS Academy of Inspiration in my living room, in a shared house in Observatory, Cape Town. I had also preference to non-institutional spaces assuming that one feels more at ease there. I learned the latter from attending ‘Conversations on Creativity’ event independently curated by Creative Nestlings in the hall on 6 Spin st. in central Cape Town. The hall was spacious with high ceilings, and I felt it lacks the homely/comfortable feeling that would encourage the audience to participate in the conversation that happens on stage. Attending a poetry night that was held at Observatory jazz bar Tagore’s second floor, on the contrary to the Spin st. space, was a homely experience. The small space was furnished with sofas and chairs that allowed people to sit around in a casual way and speak more freely. Those two examples are an illustration to of effect interior design and architec-ture have on people’s behaviour in similar social contexts.


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DIGITAL SPACES

In this technological age you should add to your potential spaces list virtual platforms like television, radio, newspapers and the Internet.

WARNING! DIGITAL SPACES COME ALSO WITH THEIR MEANINGS THAT YOU MUST BE AWARE OF. DESPITE THE FACT THAT THE INTERNET COMES WITH THE MEANING OF GLOBAL OPENNESS, IN SOME PLACES WHERE THE ACCESS TO IT IS LIMITED, THIS PLATFORM HAS ALSO EXCLUSIVE MEANINGS

You can find an example of useful Internet space with the ‘Israel love Iran’ project, executed on Facebook in 2011. Tel Aviv based graphic designer Ronny Edry has created a poster of himself with the (well designed) message: “Iranians, we will never bomb your country, we love you”. This infected Edry’s friends and their friends to post their pictures and on them stamped the message that Ronny has designed. The campaign became very viral and organically developed beyond Edry’s social circles and beyond the borders of Israel. Next thing there were posts of Iranians and their posters of love towards Israelis on Facebook.

There are curatorial practices in play in Edry’s project’ that carry lessons for socially engaged practice that strives to do things


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in the political arena. Edry’s purpose, that in a way resists the idea of borders, is best served on a virtual platform, a non-geographical location where the difference between two nations (almost) does not exist. A message of unity between the residents of Israel and Iran could not be physically exhibited under the current conditions, not allow-ing each country’s passport holders enter the other country. Curating two physical events/exhibitions in Teheran and Tel Aviv would fit the message in a weaker manner since the two ‘sides’ will need mediation to know about the other’s happening.

This project’s aim to eliminate the possibility of war between Israel and Iran was pretentious and it is hard to measure to what

RONY EDRY, ISRAEL LOVE IRAN


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degree it influenced the public discourse. Edry does claim the project made an effect on the situation: ‘The moment I really understood that something was happening, a friend of mine told me, “Google the word ‘Israel’”... We really changed how people see the Middle East… you go on Google and you say, “Israel,” and they give you the bad stuff. And for a few days you got those images’ (Edry's lecture on TED).

You can find in the ‘Israel love Iran’ project not only a good example for the use of Internet space, but also of the concept of curato-rial doing. Edry did not just say to Israelis and Iranians to reconsider how they perceive each other as enemies, he gave them metaphoric virtual megaphones to shout it themselves, activating them to do (post a photo, ‘Like’ or ‘Share’ others’ posts). He has created a participa-tion based platform for his audience to practice communication with ‘the enemy’ and publicly state their peaceful opinions. Edry did things with curatorship and not just said them since he used the potential for social impact of art that lies beyond the paradigm of critique (von Hantelmann 2010: 181).

EXTEND YOUR OPENESS TO ANY ARTIST

As writer Carolee Thea suggests, curatorship is creating a meaning using the work of others (2009:6). Like in Edry’s case, you can find many curatorial projects that do not stick to collaboration with profes-sional artists and crowd source the role of artists to the public. Those


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kinds of projects, that are participation based, can be illustrated as ‘artistic karaoke’ – where anyone can be an artist and the curator is orchestrating the show. This format of curating is now more popular at virtual platforms, but also takes place in ‘real’ spaces, like galleries and streets.

A recent example of this curatorial strategy is Kata Mijatović’s Dream Archive exhibited at the Croatian Pavilion of the 2013 Venice Biennale. The artist invited people to submit short descriptions of their dreams into an online archive that she has created. Mijatović’s purpose was ‘to bring to life the importance of the psychological space of the unconscious... primarily in our dreams, becomes one of the last oases of the internal and private that can still offer some resistance to the ‘agreed’ picture of the world’ (the exhibition's press release). She acted as a curator in this case when she used the participating audience as the artists, and their dreams as art works to be exhibited. Anyone who crosses the exhibition location can be either audience, or artist, or both. Not only is the project inclusive, like many participation-based projects, it is dependent: without cooperation from the audience there would be no exhibition (do it yourself artwork).

The choice of the right collaborating artists should depend on your personal preferences (professionals or non-professionals, a lot of people or minimal projects?) and on the purpose of your project. You don’t have to choose between the two extremes - mass crowd partici-pation projects or professional artists projects. There are endless


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options of whom you can curate – your family, community, school children, insurance salesmen, poets, actors, swimmers, cooks, etc.

Although Internet has made crowd participation in art a popular curatorial strategy, it did not invent it. Back in 1971, for example, James Coleman did something with curatorship when he challenged the notion of history in his Memory piece. Coleman invited visitors to listen to a tape recording of four-minute text, and then asked them to recite it from memory into a tape recorder. Than the new recording goes on to the next visitor, and the chain continues (von Hantelmann 2010: 24-25). This work engaged in an interesting way with collective retelling of stories, referencing to journalism and gossip. The strength point of the work was the participation of the visitor, which played an active role in the artwork.

CAMOUFLAGE IT

So far you have been shown various examples of how to overcome the elitist barrier that makes people dismiss the social influence of art: coming out of institutional spaces and formats of exhibition, includ-ing the public as participants and giving it an active role in the curato-rial project. Another strategy would be to camouflage your project being classified as art project; ‘dress up’ as another kind of action; camouflage into the everyday. Herald Read provided the philosophy of this strategy almost a century ago: ”like bread and water, [art] must


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be accepted as a matter of course, it must be an integral part of our daily life and must not be made a fuss of” (1945). The popular artistic way to do so is with interventions.

While some curators and artists go into the everyday with their ‘artistic’ projects, others bring the everyday into the art world. Richard Long presented the act of walking as a form of art in 1969; Three years later Martha Rosler organised a garage sale in a gallery; Recent-ly Marina Abramovich continued her practice of testing the bounda-ries of the art world when she set and looked at people as the main component of her solo exhibition The artist is present. The aesthetic component is added to an everyday activity when the attention we pay to it, the way we perceive or think about it, changes (Farias 2011: 440-2).

John Cage created in 1952 the famous 4’33’’ composition which is merely a name for a performance where ’no sounds are intention-ally produced’. In other words, Cage put a pianist on a stage of a theatre hall for a few minutes without playing in order to enable the audience an equal opportunity to be heard and appreciated, even in their attempts to be silent. A hall full of audience trying to be quite is an everyday thing, but Cage turned it into an act of art by making the unnoticed noticeable – intentionally highlighting this uneventful situation, giving it a name.


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HOW TO INTERACT WITH INSTITUTIONS

Please note! Whatever everyday curatorial practice you will be doing, document it. With all due respect to the dematerialisation of art, you will find having ‘evidence’ a very useful thing

As curator Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy points out, projects that exist outside museums and focus on reshaping general norms of behaviour there are two audiences: the everyday audiences (usually the participating public) and the art audiences. For the second kind of audience you need to provide something that can be exhibited in the institutional art world (2008: 225-31).

Additional approach to the ‘laundering’ of everyday activities into artistic practice field is dubbed ‘The Institutional Theory’. According to this approach, in order for an everyday activity to qualify as art it needs to have at least one ‘art world institutional qualification’ – a work made by an established artist or a work presented in a museum or a gallery. It is not the content, but the context of the work of art that counts. According to this theory,

projects that exist outside museums and focus on reshaping general norms of behaviour there are two audiences: the everyday audiences and the art audiences


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certain people in the society have the status to confer the ‘patch’ of an artwork on any act or artefact in an arbitrary decision that is then justified in theory. This is how the Institutional Theory explains the status of art given to only one of two indistinguishable objects, like Andi Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and a package of those soap pads in the supermarket (Warburton 2003: 90-95, 126).

WARNING! THE INSTITUTIONAL RECOGNITION IS OFTEN RETROACTIVE AND DELAYED. YOU NEED A LONGER BREATHE IF YOU EXPERIMENT WITH NEW PRACTICES. DON’T EXPECT IMMEDIATE RECOGNITION

An example: Look at Martha Rosler’s experience from Garage Sale series. She organized a sale of various ‘unlikely’ items like old magazines and private letters in galleries between 1973 and 2005. Rosler recalls how the approach of the institutional ‘decision makers’ to her work has changed: ‘Today, the ordinary people have the same reaction as ever, but the art public is jubilant and unapologetic, because ART is now supposed to be FUN!’ (Rosler 2005: 5-6). For more on enjoying your work see step 4.


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NOTES :

HOW TO DO THINGS WITH CURATORSHIP

SELF-HELP HANDBOOK FOR SOCIALY ENGAGED CURATORS

By Valeria Geselev

Hounours In CuratorshipMichaelis School Of Fine Art

University Of Cape Town2013

#3

How to do things with curatorship / step 3

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