Another thing I was able to download while there was limited wifi, was a collaborative book of articles titled 'Issues in Curating: Contemporary Art and Performance'. I decided i wanted to research more into contemporary curatorial thought, further than (and more recent than) just the ideas of the white cube.
Paul O'Neil - The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse
This text is a short history of contemporary curating, outlining the issues that have emerged over the last ten years. This includes:
- The Ritualisation of the art exhibition
- The Rise of Biennial Culture
- The expansion of the artist as 'Meta-Curator'
O'Neil introduces a level of academic research into this discursive field of contemporary art which outlines both the history of the art of curation as well as suggesting a new means of critiquing contemporary art curation.
- Demystification - American Art dealer Seth Sieglaub coins this term as the attempt to make visible the hidden structures of the art world. - especially in the 1960's, and it was during this time that curation turned towards a form of curatorial criticism, as oppose to these critiques being an autonomous object, thereby including the voice of the curator. (- In my own research I want to use this term 'demystification' as the process of revealing the ways in which the space is influenced by discursive ideologies.)
- Curatorial Anthologies - Along with this turn towards curating, was the beginning of curators creating an academic discussion of ways to critique their craft's efficaciousness.
- [Supporting the turn towards curating] - "Following the rise of conceptual art during the 60s and 70s, and the growing debate around institutional critique, the curator’s role took a major turn. Lucy Lippard’s essay Six years: The dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, defined and grouped artistic practices that renounced object-oriented/ tangible aesthetics, prioritizing conceptual endeavours. This meant artists focused on the idea and theory behind their artistic production rather than privileging its ultimate physical manifestation. These new complexities forced/encouraged curators to rethink their practices of mediation and acknowledge a new criticality that was moving art away from the traditional exhibition format." - exert from ' A Brief history or Curating by Gerrardo Chávez-Maza ( https://myopia.media/english/art-history-curating/) (- In other words, the curatorial voice was summoned from a discussion of dematerialisation, whereby the conceptual in art, supplanted the object in the hierarchy of importance in the art world.)
- The Curatorial Turn and Exhibitions - 'Exhibitions have become the medium through which most art becomes known.' - Ferguson, Greenberg and Nairne, 1996 (- This proves the importance and centrality of the organised art exhibition for the sustained facilitation of contemporary art. Hence while it is true that not all contemporary art is exhibited in the gallery, its popularity sets a precedent and a standard for art curation.) 'Exhibitions (in whatever form they take) are always ideological'. (- it is argued in my thesis that this is because of the haunting ideologies that occupy the empty spaces set apart for art curation.)
- Interralated for political reasons? - 'A turn towards 'academic' curating could be a politicised attempt to consider works of art as interrelated rather than individual entities, or it could be a textural response to changes in the art world itself' - Ferguson et al. -
- The recency of curation as contextualising the importance of a contemporary challenge - As recently as in 2003, Farquharson points out the emergence of the verb 'to curate' as linguistic evidence that the subject is becoming a point of discussion.
- Exhibitions as Rhetoric - 'Exhibitions are, therefore, contemporary forms of rhetoric, complex expressions of persuasion, whose strategies aim to produce a prescribed set of values and social relations for their audience.' (- the ideological implications of curating as rhetoric are self evident.)
- Importance of inclusion - 'A more specific and sustained engagement with communities and audiences...may produce a new genre of exhibition.' And then later 'In order to accommodate both artist's needs and audience demands, the new exhibition must have reciprocity and dialogue built into its structure.' (- This factor creates a guide by which to critique any 'new' genre of exhibition. As it is my opinion that the 'White Cube' space does not cater to this aspect, it is interesting to hear curators declare this as important. As if they too recognise that a change is necessary in the contexts within which we display artworks.) Ferguson et al, 2005
Globalisation in Biennial culture - 'Biennial culture is driven by identity and an ideological drive, apart fro the particular issues of scale, temporality and location (- Is it not odd to declare temporality and location an issue rather than an integral element for the contextual experience) the activity of curation made manifest through such exhibitions is articulated as being identity-driven; therefore an overtly politicised, discursively global and fundamentally auteur-ed (influenced by authorship) praxis prevails.'
- 'Global Exhibitions' often have as their main theme, 'globalisation', whilst questioning the ideological underpinning of the exhibition itself as a product of that process.'
Further reflections this week:
The social experience of sound permeating different listening experiences in not an uncommon phenomena in our contemporary climate. As it has been written that the disembodied voice can now commonly be heard acousmatically with the invention of the radio, we now use headphones, small speakers on phones and in-ears or even with recent development of bone-conducting technologies, are all examples of ways that the listening experience can make a soical situation immensely personal.
The challenge thast the parametric speakers bring to the discussion is that of making this personal experience within a public space, public once more and allow those sounds to interact with the architecture and volume of the space, rather than caged from it with the use of noise-cancelling technologies etc.
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