Interview: Emily Pringle on Curatorial Research

Emily Pringle is Head of Research, Tate, a member of the BAN Steering Group and author of Rethinking Research in the Art Museum (Routledge, 2019). Emily was to be keynote speaker at the cancelled BAN Conference ‘Research and the Museum Ecosystem’, scheduled to take place at National Museum Cardiff in March 2019. Here, Emily discusses with Martin Myrone some of the themes apparent in the recorded presentations, now made available with her introductory essay here.

M. Something that strikes me about all the presentations is the emphasis on questions of curatorial agency – how curators operate within or against institutional settings. But then there is also a lot of emphasis on sharing, devolving or dissolving curatorial authority. What’s the place of individual curatorial agency in museums? And am I wrong to conflate agency and authority like this?

I think there is still a vital need for curatorial expertise within museums and for curators to have agency to make best use of their expertise. I am more troubled by the idea of curatorial authority as it brings to my mind unhelpful notions of epistemological hierarchies and the problematics of the curator being the only person entitled to have an ‘authoritative’ interpretation of art. The recent drive to more collaborative working practices, wherein curatorial expertise sits alongside the expertise of others, both fellow museum practitioners and those external to the museum, in my view can open up opportunities to enrich the curation and interpretation of art without undermining curatorial agency. For me this shift away from a singular curatorial authority is indicative of the changing place of the art museum within contemporary society and culture; a shift towards the art museum as a site of collective knowledge creation rather than as a temple of art. Curators have a crucial role to play in enabling this transformation, but in doing so they have to relinquish the sense that they and only they can determine the meaning and value of art. It is interesting and a bit troubling to me that a number of the papers indicate that for curators to make this move they have to work in opposition to their institutions.

M. You make striking use Donna Haraway’s thoughts about ‘staying with the trouble’, something that she posits as a productive response to our moment where everything seems so uncertain. But is it also that we are, after 2020, in a moment of very definite views and actions, about social justice, about class and race, political self-interest? Is ‘staying with the trouble’ curatorially about working with or against the prevailing conditions of our times?

I am very drawn to Haraway’s ideas of ‘staying with the trouble’ in part because she argues that to do this we are required to be ’truly present’ and be prepared both to make trouble and to ‘rebuild quiet places.’ I interpret this to mean that we must reflect and take action to address the problems that we face currently, be they ones of social justice, ecological disaster and/or all the myriad challenges we are facing because of the Covid-19 pandemic. I don’t think I would frame in in terms of working either with or against the prevailing conditions, but rather think of it in relation to acknowledging the complexity of the situation we are in and committing through every curatorial decision and action we take to make a positive difference. What artists do we chose to show? Who gets to make those decisions? Who do we prioritise as an institution in terms of audiences? Whose voices are present in the interpretation of the work? How do we as individuals and as an institution learn from the decisions we make? These are some of the questions that curators who are ‘staying with the trouble’ need to be asking themselves, whilst also recognising that there are no easy answers and that it is vital to acknowledge complexity and the care that is needed to make change.

M. I was struck by Ólöf Gerður Sigfúsdottir’s allusion to the ‘double agency’ embodied in curatorial research. Is this positioning ‘between’ fields, institutions or disciplines a condition for research? Can research be wholly organised within and contained by a museum and remain research in the critical, reflexive sense that you’ve carefully set out?

Olof makes a compelling case in her paper for the museum as a site for knowledge generation and the specificity and value of museum-based research, a great deal of which aligns with my thinking. I see the museum as affording modes of research that are in some cases harder to undertake within the academy, in part because of the opportunities for cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary enquiry that the museum can accommodate. Museums are not universities and although they can present multiple barriers to research, they are also relatively free from the regulatory and rigid disciplinary barriers that can exist within the academy. Museums are not, for example, subject to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) assessment, an exercise that has been criticised for curtailing practice-based research. They are instead at liberty to determine for themselves what constitutes research centred in and seeking to inform practice. At the same time, it is vital that museums work closely with researchers situated

in the academy in equal partnership. Research wholly organised with and contained by any institution would seem to me to run the risk of being solipsistic and potentially not subject to sufficient critical interrogation. Instead, in my experience the most fruitful positioning for research in the art museum is both within and ‘between’ institutions, with practitioner-researchers in the museum working reflexively with academic researchers from the university to enable the new insights gained to inform museum practice and the academy.

M. The idea of ‘practice as research’ has become prevalent, even dominant, in our sector, it seems quite suddenly over perhaps just the last 5 years. Does that timeframe sound right to you? And what do you see as the conditions or changes which have given rise to this development?

I think there have been drives to recognise practice-based or practice as research in education more broadly and in theatre and fine art departments in art schools and universities specifically for more like 20 years. The latter has been prompted in the UK by the institutions’ involvement in research assessment exercises and the need to justify art and theatre practice as research to qualify for research funding. Such attempts to frame fine art practice as research have definitely impacted on art museum-based activity, both within curatorial and learning departments, particularly as you say in the last 5 years. At the same time writers/theorists such as Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson have been active in arguing for curatorial practice to be understood as research-based; as a form of dialogical practice ‘in which the processual and serendipitous overlap with speculative actions and open-ended forms of production’, as they say in their 2015 book ‘Curating Research.’ Rather than seeing curating as exclusively linked to exhibition making, they put forward a more expanded conception of curating as an active form of knowledge production. And as soon as you determine an activity such as curating in epistemological terms, it is relatively easy to align it with research. One of the positives stemming from this broader construction of the curator is that it recognises the research that has in my view always been a key element of curation, but that until recently has not been given due attention.

M. To a sceptic, a lot of what is classed (and funded as) as ‘practice as research’ looks a lot like, well, practice – educational workshops, consultation sessions, marketing analysis, creative work etc. Is practice as research just a euphemism for practice, and the kinds of museum practice which in other (more affluent times) would be funded in other ways?

I have enjoyed the conversations we have had together over the years in relation to this point! I agree with you that at times it is difficult to unpick where the research exists within some practice as research and I would argue that we need to be very clear and specific in relation to this. Otherwise practice as research loses any credibility. I think it is important to clarify in the first instance what constitutes research, and then to make clear the difference between practice and practice as research. In relation to the first point, having looked at several definitions of research I am keen on the simple understanding of research as needing to be led by a question, that it follows a structured process of enquiry and that it must generate original knowledge that goes out into the world. In differentiating between practice and practice as research, I am a fan of the writer Robin Nelson’s clarification. He argues that for practice to move to practice as research it must be underpinned by a research question, that the process of enquiry must involve moments of critical reflection and be fully documented and that the praxis under scrutiny must be situated within the appropriate practical and theoretical lineage. If these processes are followed then I think it is possible to avoid practice as research becoming a euphemism for practice, but again it requires time and thought to do this.

M. There is a recurring question raised in the presentations and by your own programmatic analysis, which is not just about how to do curatorial research, but who gets to do it? With that in play, do you think ‘curator’ as a term retains its validity?

I do think the term ‘curator’ still has validity and I am not convinced by the argument that surfaces periodically that we are all curators now because we select our own Spotify playlists, for example. The curator within the art museum has a clear and important role to play in terms of building and holding knowledge about the art and artists and in communicating this knowledge through displays, exhibitions, interpretation and public programmes (for a start). However, in the twenty-first century art museum, curators are not the only people with valuable expertise and in my view the shift that needs to take place is more structural than semantic. Entrenched hierarchies and processes within art museums that embed discrimination and exclusion need to be fully acknowledged and dismantled and new models developed that allow for multiple narratives to exist in relation to art. It is, as you recognise, vital that museums pay very close attention to who gets to be a curator, but they also need to pay equal amounts of attention to how curators work, not least with the other ‘experts’ across and beyond their organisations.