[-empyre-] Curatorial Studies

[Jennifer Fisher]

Hi All,

Apologies for the lapse. We have been travelling the last few days, and now find ourselves off grid in a frosty cabin on a mountain lake posting in town at the WiFi cafe.

Thank you for the provocative questions and thoughts.

We've been trying to focus our posts on projects in which we are currently involved, such as an exhibition reckoning with questions of a mass audience for art, and the launch of a curatorial studies journal that we are editing. We see the role of editors and curators as somewhat continuous insomuch as not only selecting, but also mobilizing and framing contingent conditions for communication. For us, the agency of curatorship simultaneously engages the criticality of choice (of works presented) with conditions of reception, which are necessarily performative. 

Regarding Tim's point that the Biennale Reader "seemed to promote curatorial authority over artistic production and institutional position over the independent status of so many artists," as independent curators we do not speak on behalf of the institution. Our role is perhaps closer to that of artists in a provisional and interventional sense. Our agency as curators is involved with staging and configuring of art in collaboration with artists to produce events for diverse audiences. While we take care to focus a curatorial proposition, at the same time, we have to let our attachment to any specific outcome go. Just as we cannot impose meaning, we cannot control the ultimate impact of an exhibition. So, we do not see criticality and ludic participation as mutually exclusive -- putting these elements into play so to speak engages them simultaneously. 

So happily we take Pedro's point about curating as creating spaces, revolutionary or revelatory.  For us, the purview of the curatorial is conjunctural, operating in the connections of art, communities, spaces, histories, discourses, aesthetics, affects in ways that may achieve coherence (or fail to). While acknowledging that ultimately the budgets impact on what is possible in exhibitions, we resist the instrumentalization or containment of both art and curating. Rather, curatorial practice involves a rigorous criticality considering the always-already mediating conditions pertaining to art's presentation. The curator as communicator can then function first as "curer" through the homeopathic mimicry of symptoms for critical revelation, for thinking of rhetorics of arrangement of art in place differently. The curator can secondly also function as "carer" -- in Foucauldian sense of "care of the self" -- through the integration of techniques that can achieve a "turn" within aesthetic experience's transformative impact. This is where integrating the senses beyond vision becomes interesting to us. To these we would add an additional etymological aspect of curate -- "curiosity" -- which impels curators, artists and audiences toward engagement with the art and presentation event. 

Until soon,

Jennifer and Jim


Jennifer Fisher, PhD
Associate Professor, Contemporary Art and Curatorial Studies
Department of Visual Arts CFA 252
YORK UNIVERSITY
4700 Keele Street
Toronto, ON  M3J 1P3
jefish at yorku.ca




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