#curatinglab2014

YQ:  I guess my question touches on degrees of moderation. When attempting to present an artwork in a new way- whether by deconstruction or with shifting contexts - do you consciously attend to your curatorial gestures to act as footnotes to the works (rather than a violent 'wrench')? And how do you prevent a curatorial gesture from seeping/slipping into an artistic one? MAX: Sorry for the silence here we have been dealing with a lot of stuff (proposals, grant application, meetings…) before everyone puts their shutters down and vanishes for the August holidays. It's worth remembering that curating is often much like seasonal labour! Deadlines and budgets orbit around the cultural macro-economy and political cycles. Anyway, all great questions!I'd like to respond a little to this "When attempting to present an artwork in a new way- whether by deconstruction or with shifting contexts - do you consciously attend to your curatorial gestures to act as footnotes to the works (rather than a violent 'wrench')?"In general I am of the belief that the intentions of the artist must always be paramount. It is their work not yours. Particularly when we are dealing with epistemological approach that deals with layers of knowledge, "facts" and interpretation rather than an ontological art that operates around the status of art itself, of being, essence, etc. On the one hand the curatorial context would be more of an interpretative order, on the other hand it would be a matter of plausibility and belief, where there is more leeway.As is discussed in the OpenCurating interview with Steven ten Thije, depending on context, a portrait painting of a King Henry VIII is effectively a document about Elizabethan England that can be read in terms of royal power, the codes of dress, etc. Yet it could also be part of a show about developments in pigment, varnishes and painting technique. Or a show about the artist who was employed to paint this painting as well as several different versions. So the context actually produces something's status – as art, or as a document, or a visual footnote. Confusingly it seems that art is not an inherent quality of the artwork!Another example I mentioned before to some of you. Jackson Pollock said his paintings were dealing with Jungian psychodrama. But they became part of a modernist narrative about "all over" abstract surfaces and reductionism, and then later were read as precursors of body and performance art, both of which have ostensibly nothing to do with what he thought he was doing. In the same way Yves Klein's Anthropometries could plausibly be in a show about martial arts. Great art is able to be generous! And great curating and great art history thrives by creating new meanings.The degree to which works of art are "used" by curators to create what some would see as a kind of bigger collective art work is in some respects an ethical debate, and one that has been around since the rise of the curator-figure as an "author". Many artists withdrew from Harald Szeeman's 1972 Documenta V as they considered his framework overbearing. Check out Robert Smithson's classic "Cultural Confinement" essay "Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits."http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/cultural.htmOr this whammy from Robert Morris...http://grupaok.tumblr.com/.../robert-morris-letter-to...I guess my further response is somewhat tangential in itself, but as Mariana an I often find ourselves working with art works whose meanings are not self-evident right away, or that have a sometimes elaborate context that needs to be understood for the work to function, we have found ourselves thinking quite a lot about different ways the deal with the notion of "footnotes".Yet it could first be argued that in fact it is the job of the artist to precisely present any "footnotes" that they would consider absolutely critical to contextualise their film/sculpture/installation etc., in a way that is integral and bound-in to the work. For example, there is a great function called the title! I'm thinking of something like Martha Rosler’s, “The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems” (1974-5)http://www.museumashub.org/.../bowery-two-inadequate...or Ronald Jones' "The bed Neil Armstrong slept in his first night back from the moon, 1969-1998."http://www.metropicturesgallery.com/.../1998-03-14.../2/Or an extreme example, this work by Jordon Wolfson in which the title is over 700 words long, it's a transcription of the speech which is seen in sign language in the film, and its source, all as part of the title. So these words will always "travel" with the piece throughout time and wherever it is shown.http://whitney.org/www/2006biennial/artists.php...More often we have found a way to work with artists, for example with Lara Almarcegui http://lttds.org/projects/almarcegui/andIratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkumhttp://www.lttds.org/projects/jaiovangorkum/.... where we have worked very closely and collaboratively to craft precisely worded short texts that accompanying the works. Standardized work descriptions in the case of Lara (where otherwise you'd be looking at, for example, a picture of pile of dirt with no idea what is going on) and wall texts in the case of Iratxe & Klaas. These are somewhat different from a standard work caption or catalogue entry as they're effectively part of the work. They carry the burden of communicating some very basic and necessary facts about the work using an objective style, but also hint towards the motives or the internal logic of the work. This has been a very rewarding approach and also something that has led us to think more and more in hybrid ways between exhibitions and books, and that for example there could or should be as much possibility for subtlety and clarity in an exhibition experience in terms of footnotes and textual "signposting", or full page images and thumbnails, as there is in reading or browsing. That's all for nowmiss you guys!MM