[-empyre-] Container Culture: Forward from Gunalan Nadarajan

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

Dear empyreans,

At the invitation from Christina McPhee, I am posting the following  
information on the Container Culture exhibition that was recently  
shown at ISEA2006 San Jose:

Container Culture: Curatorial Concept (Steve Dietz and Gunalan  
Nadarajan)

One of the most significant examples of cross-cultural encounters in  
contemporary art is the traveling exhibition. The traveling art  
exhibition has often served to operationalize and exemplify the cross- 
cultural encounters and exchanges that are deemed 'necessary' and  
'natural' in the globalized art world. However, the traveling  
exhibition is rarely this straightforward gesture in/of globalization  
as the cross-cultural encounters engendered by such exhibitions are  
complicated by a range of social, political, economic and art  
historical differences. The artists in traveling exhibitions are  
rarely able to respond to each new context through their works, and  
even if they do, these are usually minimal and therefore rarely  
responsive or responsible to the cultural encounters these  
exhibitions are meant to initiate. The traveling exhibition thus  
converts every new cultural context to an empty container for the art  
works to be merely placed in with some sensitivity at best to the  
exhibition site as physical location.

'Container Culture' is an exhibition of art works that travel from  
different port cities in Asia-Pacific in standardized containers to  
San Jose to be presented alongside each other; almost like a  
conference of containers. In an ironic reversal of the tendency of  
conventional traveling exhibitions to convert every new space into an  
empty container, this exhibition invites curators and artists from  
each of these port cities to convert a container into a culturally- 
specific space. The exhibition conceptually draws on and hopes to  
deliberate on some of the following notions:

a) Ports - as liminal spaces that have traditionally and still negotiate
the relations between countries - and this draws on and elaborates a
whole set of related concepts of commerce, exchange values, customs
procedures, border anxieties, legal trade vs illegal traffic, etc.;

b) Containers as Spaces- as instantiations that mimic the white cube  
as an empty 'container' even while potentially enabling the  
subversion of the
white cube's immobility by their portability;

c) Transportation - the notion of artworks traveling in space and time
between countries and hopefully bringing some of the culturally specific
elements of one place to another - and of course the related concepts of
location, cultural specificities, speed, proximitiy and distance.

d) Networks. Transporting shipping containers from one port city to  
another maps a network of economic relationships. By specifically  
curating new media installations, Container Culture investigates the  
effect of virtual networks to create real cultural connections.
Some Issues that were raised and discussed at the Pacific Rim New  
Media Summit:

1. One of the original intents of this project was to enable a model  
for and instance of distributed curating where a single curatorial  
concept would be differently realized, locally presented and then  
subsequently travel to several other ports as part of a network of  
exhibitions or become connected to a final destination where the  
separate realizations of the concept would be presented side-by-side.  
However, the logistic difficulties and different funding levels of  
the projects in each city meant that several aspects of the original  
plan had to be abandoned. Despite the fact that we were not able to  
realize the original plan, the project as it has evolved is equally  
interesting. It will be useful then to begin to look at what other  
models of distributed curating could be evolved in the future. What  
are the peculiar challenges and possibilities of such curatorial  
projects? How does one negotiate the specificities of location in the  
development of such projects?

2. The original concept of the project also focused on engaging  
different aspects of the container - its vocabulary of  
standardization, its spatial restrictions and its portability. What  
are some of the specific ways in which some of the projects have  
engaged the specificities of containers as exhibition spaces?

3. An important decision in the project was where to place the  
containers. While the original idea was to place it in the Caesar  
Chavez plaza and exploit its openness and public accessibility, due  
to several reasons we could not use this space. We eventually decided  
to place it closer to the San Jose Museum. The initial idea was to  
place it outside the museum without much connection to the building  
as such. The final decision however was to 'dock' each of the  
containers into one of the entrances of the museum. This notion of  
docking into a larger building we (Steve and I) felt better reflected  
the idea of these containers as spaces to load, store, transport and  
unload things. The connection that the containers made to the main  
building also interestingly extends the museum outwards even as it  
makes inroads into it. What are the strategies to work with temporary  
exhibition spaces? How do and should these spaces connect to the more  
permanent ones?

4. What are some of the curatorial issues of each of the containers?  
What are the issues and concerns of the various works in the  
containers from the different port cities? How do these works benefit  
from or resonate with the other works and containers in this exhibition?

5. The issue of the failures of the project (or more accurately,  
unrealized aspects of the project) was raised several times - that we  
did not realise the project as it was initially conceived was though  
framed as an important lesson in planning for subsequent projects and  
as a basis for thinking about the challenges of distributed curating.

Guna

Gunalan Nadarajan
Co-Curator, Container Culture