DISCURSIVE

titude when speaking about artists and objects was, to me, unnecessarily clinical and overly specific. It wasn’t until a year or so later that one of the underlying causes became clear.

A colleague and I were getting back into her car to drive back to work after our first day of critiquing a group of students’ thesis work; it was exhausting but typical for a full day of crits.

That wasn’t quite what I expected. She stated, somewhat amused.

I was about to ask what about the student’s work or presentations was unexpected, when it dawned on me. Wait, was that the first time you’ve critiqued?

Yeah. She said.

What!? Oh my God, I had no idea! I would’ve prepared you!

I just assumed.

At that point in my career it was still pretty opaque to me how someone became a curator, but I assumed it had a similar trajectory from mine: going to art school, just with less exposure to toxic chemicals. Over half my life—my entire artistic education—was predicated on critique. What other skill set is there to critically looking at art? I assumed art historical analysis was just one of those dialectical discrepancies that ultimately meant what I knew as critique.

Those different approaches and how they relate to one another is something I think about quite frequently. Contrary to my scholastic achievement in geometry, I have a tendency to envision ideas as graphs. I’ve come to see critique and art historical analysis as horizontal and vertical curves, their intersection point being the work of art. The crucial variable is time,when the analytical juncture occurs, and its effects. My innate methodology when looking at art is to reverse engineer it back through the artist’s hand and into the studio. Critique often happens during (or very close to) the time of creation. The artist is able to change course or refine her approach based on the feedback, and therefore all of the adjacent possibilities are considered up for discussion. Critique sees the piece along the vertical curve of that individual artist, her ideas, and the myriad possible forms her intent can take.

14