step #2 : pick a great purpose #2
step #2 : pick a great purpose
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how to do things with curatorship
PLEASE NOTE! THIS QUESTION IS THE FIRST AND MOST IMPORTANT ONE YOU WILL HAVE TO ANSWER AS AN EMERGING CURATOR WHO WANTS TO DO THINGS. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE? WHAT ARE YOU DOING A CERTAIN PROJECT FOR? WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE?
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step #2 : pick a great purpose You may skip this step and start executing curatorial projects before answering that question, but you will have to come back to it later. This step is the core of your doing – what you will say to yourself when things go wrong or you miss out an evening’s events. It’s the unnerving question your aunt would ask you when sitting at a family dinner, ‘what exactly are you doing with your life’. The clearer your purpose to you, the clearer your decision making process enabling effective prioritisation of time. Many practitioners in the “A lecture or a wall field of curatorship that I have label maybe among encountered skip this step our tools but my and never ask themselves the goal is to re-unite purpose question. As a curator a neighbourhood you might find yourself doing through the living something without knowing why. manifestation of an A big European museum curator artist’s ideas - ideas answered ‘I’ve been doing this that would otherwise for 40 years, and I like the people look solely symbolic” I work with’ when I asked him Mary Jane Jacob what his motivation was and why he chose to go to work every day. This is an approach of a professional that does not appreciate the tool that Curatorship itself can be but rather treats it as just another job. A younger contemporary curator from a well known American institution that I encountered said that he
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how to do things with curatorship felt uncomfortable with the question. If you want to be a curator that does things with curatorship – make sure you have asked yourself this sincerely. American curator Mary Jane Jacob, for example, left the museum to work on independent projects with communities driven by the ambition to re-unite neighbourhoods by commissioning artists to create unpredictable street installations (Thea 2009: 7). WARNING! IF YOUR SOLE PURPOSE IS TO MAKE A PERFECTLY FUNCTIONING EXHIBITION WITH ZERO MISTAKES – YOU ARE NOT DOING THINGS WITH CURATORSHIP. THIS HANDBOOK OFFERS YOU TO APPROACH CURATORSHIP AS A MEANS TO ACHIEVE A PURPOSE, NOT THE PURPOSE ITSELF You can learn how curatorial strategy can contradict the curatorial purpose from When Attitudes Become Form that was curated by Germano Celant for Prada Foundation Venice (2013). Celant reconstructed the 1969 legendary exhibition held at the Kunsthalle Bern under the same title. The original exhibition was famous for promoting the view that ‘everything is art’, showcasing Conceptual artists and ‘regular’ materials such as water and margarine. The intention expressed in the curatorial statement of the 2013 exhibition was ‘to do away with the traditional ritual of showing and contemplating a work, replacing it with an experience of its process … something out of control and without rules that aimed at demythicizing the sacredness of painting and sculpture’ (Celant 2013).
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step #2 : pick a great purpose Ironically, Celant’s curatorial strategy achieved the contrary. Since the works were not allowed to be touched, as a viewer one could feel a distance from the art. Celant did not seem to act on his purpose in his curatorial strategy as the curator of the 1969 exhibition Herald Szeemann did. The purpose of the original curator to break the barriers between art and its audience was not re-enacted in the 2013 version as well as the physical aspects were.
HOW TO PERSUE POLITICAL GOALS WITH CURATORSHIP The purposes of doing things with curatorship can vary, and include almost anything: You can stop wars, heal communities after disasters, re-write history, protest, educate, inform, do group therapy, and even influence real estate prices with curatorship. If those sound to you like pretentious purposes for a curator, I hope the examples You can stop wars, mentioned in this handbook will re-write history, prove you otherwise. I will try protest, educate, do to convince you that one can (at group therapy, and least try to) change the world even influence real using this profession. Curatorestate prices with ship is a creative tool for endless curatorship range of purposes.
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how to do things with curatorship Let’s start with the pretentious purpose of putting an end to one of the longest current political conflicts. Artist JR used curatorship to make a political act of reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. He started the Face 2 Face project (2007), what he himself calls ‘the biggest illegal photography exhibition ever’. With ‘co-conspirator’ Marco, he posted huge street posters of duos of portraits of Israelis and Palestinians in eight cities on the both sides of the separation wall between Israel and the Palestinian territories. The curatorial choices were made to serve the purpose of reconciliation between the two groups: ‘these people look the same; they
JR, FACE 2 FACE PROJECT (2007)
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step #2 : pick a great purpose speak almost the same language, like twin brothers raised in different families. It's obvious, but they don't see that. We must put them face to face. They will realize...’. The photographed individuals were exhibited in pairs of Palestinians and Israelis doing the same job. The purpose of this curatorial project was to show ‘the other’, to surprise people and make them rethink the things they believe in, to show the resemblance in expression of those photographed. You can find a good example of curatorship that is ‘sticking to the purpose’ in Face 2 Face. The purpose of promoting reconciliation effected the choice of audience (the general public on the two sides), exhibiting format (duos of street posters), place (random central location walls in Palestinian and Israeli cities and the separation wall itself) and timing (ongoing exhibition, the posters are left on the street for years if they are not taken off, one can see the same poster every day on the way to work). Even though his ‘title’ is artist his work caries lessons for curators. JR’s projects explore new ways in exhibiting urban areas and aiming at non-museum goers audience. He is doing things with curatorship when he chooses the exhibiting formats that suit best his purpose. JR’s work is an example for a practice that blurs the borders between art-making and curatorship (see step 1 for more on artists-curators). Another example of a curatorial project with political purposes from the Middle East is Israel love Iran Facebook campaign by Rony Edry, described in step 1.
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how to do things with curatorship HOW TO PURSUE SOCIAL GOALS WITH CURATORSHIP You can choose to pursue more social than political purposes with curatorship, if you wish. A pretentious purpose for this line of curatorial doing can be community development. In an attempt to deal with the aftermath of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, a disaster unprecedented on a national scale, Japanese artist Koki Tanaka did something with curatorship. As an attempt to strengthen the community feeling of ‘togetherness’ in front "The problems of of the disaster he organised a tea temporary housing party, a group sleep-over and a and the nuclear city walk at night while swinging power plant remain... torches, among other activities the question asked by in the spirit of Happenings and most Japanese artists Relational Art. was, what can art do when faced with an He called the project Precarievent like this?" ous tasks. As curator Mika Kuraya reflects on the project, Koki Tanaka ‘to those of us in Japan now, having gone through such a definitive experience, it seems a metaphor for working together to build a post-quake society’ (2013: online). This project intended to try and
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step #2 : pick a great purpose do something with the situation in Japan to somehow relieve people’s anxieties. The use of curatorship in social purposes is approached by many in post-2011 Japan where the earthquake is still very vivid in people’s lives, as described by the artist Tanaka: ‘rubble is still being cleared, the problems of temporary housing and the nuclear power plant remain. Since the quake a sizeable contingent of artists, architects, musicians, filmmakers and other creatives have been volunteering on the ground, or taking action that reflects their own practice. .. the question asked by most Japanese artists was, what can art do when faced with an event like this? So what could I personally do?’’. The key words in Tanaka’s description are doing and action. And this is why this project is socially engaged and not merely saying or reflecting. With the purpose of strengthening the feeling of togetherness, the events that were curated for the project approached the participants as the primary audience. Tanaka created an experience for his participants that communicated the social-therapeutic purpose through creative action. Tanaka: ‘each of us has within ourselves a problem... Problems always bring with them pain, and this pain, too, is something we cannot share with others so we should explore engagement not through sympathy but through some other means. People gathering together temporarily deals with specific situations when unusual things happen. This occurs not only through art projects, but also in our day-to-day lives. In this series or projects, participants are invited to gather and
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how to do things with curatorship experience specific and weird situations generated by my loose framework – several precarious ideas’. Precarious task #0 was communal tea drinking held on a rainy September Sunday in 2012 in Tokyo. Using online platforms like Facebook and Twitter Tanaka sent out a call to friends to come to Aoyama Meguro Gallery with a tea bag from home. In the venue he set up a kettle and asked the participants to place their tea bags in it.
KOKI TANAKA, PRECARIOUS TASK #0 (2012)
Tanaka: ‘I suppose there would have been somewhere between forty and fifty people there... this was a tea blend that changed depending on the people... the focus shifted to the gathering itself”. How did this
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step #2 : pick a great purpose project serve the purpose of somehow healing people’s anxieties? It created an experience of social sharing in a creative way, like an artistic group therapy. WARNING! ARTISTS TRANSFORM EVERYDAY ACTIVITIES INTO WHAT IS ACCEPTED AS EVERYDAY ART WITH THREE MAIN TECHNIQUES: IMPOSING A CREATIVE ‘TWIST’ ON THE ACTIVITY, DOCUMENTING IT AND ACTING WITHIN ART-INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK You might ask yourself at this point what makes this everyday activity an act of curatorship or art. As described in step 1, this is a frequently asked question nowadays in the art world, with an inflation of artistic acts that look like ‘normal’ activities. In the case of Precarious tasks, Tanaka used all the three techniques: he imposed rules when he asked every participant to bring a tea bag, added a ‘twist’ when blending fifty different tea bags in one kettle, documented the project with photographs and text and acted within institutional framework (being an established artist and having The Japan Foundation as partners). As a credit to the participants/artists, their names are listed in the publications of Precarious tasks. This is another example of a participation-based project, where the artist acts as a curator and orchestrates the participants, who are many times also the audience (See step 3 for more on the curatorial use of crowd sourcing).
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how to do things with curatorship The project was chosen by Japan to represent the country at the 2013 Venice Biennale, one of the temples of the contemporary art world, as part of a larger exhibition titled Abstract speaking - sharing uncertainty and collective acts. When the audience walked into the Japanese pavilion, they were presented with texts, photographs and videos. Including Precarious tasks in a larger exhibition added a second layer of curatorship to the project. In Tokyo the happenings were the artworks and their organisation was the curatorial aspect; in Venice the artworks were the photographs and other documentation forms and the placement of them in the pavilion space was the act of curatorship. The curator of the pavilion, Mika Kuraya, considered this complexity of the project being transformed from a happening into an exhibition, and the acts into photographs and texts. Her solution to this duality is expressed in the structure of the labels at the exhibition. Mind the two categories of describing the art work – a form and a material: year: 2012 form: collective acts material: photograph and text size: 730X1100mm
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step #2 : pick a great purpose The Precarious tasks project was not custom-made for the Biennale. It is an ongoing Since the purpose is one, which is another way of to make a positive curatorial doing that is based effect on the on the purpose of the project. Japanese society, Since the purpose is to make a the time frame of the positive effect on the Japanese project is ongoing, society, the time frame of the and not a one-time project is ongoing, and not happening for a a one-time happening that is specific exhibition done for a specific exhibition. It is a project that develops as it goes. It is a direct continuity of a project that Tanaka started in 2010, before the earthquake, as an attempt to investigate the nature of collective acts. With the disaster, the project changed and adjusted itself to the situation to be more useful as a social tool that does things (Kuraya 2013: online). For more examples on improvisation in curatorship see step 4. HOW TO PURSUE THERAPEUTIC GOALS WITH CURATORSHIP Another curatorial approach to choosing a purpose is starting with your personal life. You can provide therapy or heal with curatorship, for example by promoting creative solutions to personal problems. A
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how to do things with curatorship great source of inspiration on the incorporation of personal life with artistic doing can be found in the works of Sophie Calle. Just to name a few examples, at the 2007 Venice Biennale she exhibited two works based on therapeutic goals: one about her mother’s death (Pas pu saisir la mort) and the other about her partner’s break up letter (Take care of yourself). As many artists do, Calle started from a personaltherapeutic need and transformed it into a form that can infect and affect others. The project developed into an act of female empowerment. This is how Calle describes the project (notice the first person singular tense):
SOPHIE CALLE, TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF (2007)
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step #2 : pick a great purpose ‘I received an email telling me it was over. I didn’t know how to respond. It was almost as if it hadn’t been meant for me. It ended with the words, ‘take care of yourself’. And so I did. I asked 107 women (including two made of wood and one with feathers), chosen for their profession or skills, to interpret this letter. To analyze it, comment on it, dance to it, sing with it. Dissect it. Exhaust it. Understand it for me. Answer to it for me. It was a way of taking the time to break up. A way of taking care of myself’. Calle outsourced to dozens of strangers the role of narrating her ex’s email and used what they gave her without censoring. Besides resolving her personal uneasiness with the breakup, she sent a feminist message of social revenge on patriarchy as ‘the squirming writer of the letter was crushed under 107 potent heels’ (Coulter-Smith 2007: online). WARNING! SOPHIE CALLE PLAYS WITH THE BORDER BETWEEN ARTISTS AND CURATORS AND CHALLENGES IT, LIKE MANY OTHER BORDERS. SHE ORCHESTRATED OTHER PROFESSIONALS AND THE WAY SHE TALKS ABOUT THE MAKING OF THE WORK SOUNDS MORE LIKE CURATORSHIP Calle: ‘I asked all these women to respond, and I used whatever they gave me without rejecting or censoring anything….First I asked two girlfriends, one of whom happens to be a journalist, the other a
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how to do things with curatorship writer. And that’s how I got the idea... I began to think about the more obvious jobs whose work it is to analyse words—the psychoanalyst, the corrector—then I tried to specialize: the philosopher, who then gave me the philologist, who in turn gave me the moral philosopher, and so on...' (Neri: online). The skills she used in the project can be ‘categorized’ as curatorial skills – executing an idea by commissioning other professionals to do it, and supervising. For the Biennale Calle did look for a curator, but not an ordinary one. She put an ad in the newspaper to recruit “an enthusiastic person to act as exhibition curator”. From around 200 replies, she chose an artist to fill the position - Daniel Buren (Thorn 2010: 2). Calle: ‘what I needed was not so much a curator as a complice, someone to stand by me... he helped me to think about the work... As a result, I had much more fun in Venice. I played so much that I was even afraid to be too much like a student who wants to experiment with everything!’ (Neri: online). The personal need to deal with death created one of the most widely spread and talked about curatorial projects of the recent years. American artist Candy Chang was effected by losing someone she loved when she decided to create the Before I Die project that is now active on over 300 walls in 50 countries. She wanted to infect audience with remembering what they want to achieve in life and designed an interactive graffiti-based street project, with multiple stencils saying ‘Before I Die I want to ______’.
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step #2 : pick a great purpose
CANDY CHANG, BEFORE I DIE MURAL AND A 'CURATE IT YOURSELF' KIT
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how to do things with curatorship The walls where painted with black board colour that allowed people to fill in their personal wish using chalks. ‘The project is about remembering what is important to you, creating a public space for contemplation, and reimagining how our public spaces can better reflect what matters to us as a community and as individuals’ is the official statement of the project'. The original installation of Before I die was created in February 2011 in New Orleans and lasted for eight months, when the property on which wall the project was on, was sold. Since the purpose of Chang was universal and not site-specific, the project developed (see step 4 for more on improvisation). PLEASE NOTE! CANDY CHANG'S PURPOSE TO INFECT AS MUCH PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE WITH HER PROJECT WAS APPROACHED WITH AN ORIGINAL CURATORIAL INVENTION: A TOOLKIT FOR ‘CREATING YOUR OWN WALL’ THAT CAN BE PURCHASED ONLINE Each 'curate it yourself' kit includes a stencil with a full column of the fill-in-the-blank sentence, a headline stencil, metal chalk holders, two boxes of chalk, vinyl gloves, and a comprehensive how-to guide. ‘At $125 per kit, we’re providing these as close to the production cost as possible. We want to ensure that anyone who wants to make a wall can afford to do it’ as is the text in the site. This is doing things with curatorship by distributing the projects to all corners of the
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step #2 : pick a great purpose globe. Considering the financial barriers that might make it harder for communities to invest in a toolkit, Chang offers a digital folder of recourses for free download, including edit-able files of the large “Before I die…” headline, as well as the column of fill-in-theblank sentences, a how-to guide, and a handy summary of the Considering the required supplies and specificafinancial barriers that tions (see step 3 for more about might make it harder the project). for communities to invest in a tool kit, My first curatorial experiChang offers a digital ence was also serving a personfolder of recourses al need of people to deal with for free download death. When my friend, Tel Aviv based photographer Asaf Kliger offered me to co-curate an exhibition at his late grandfather’s apartment soon after the funeral, I knew my purpose was to do an alternative farewell ceremony with curatorship. Keeping in mind this purpose I made my professional decisions for the project, titled ‘I’m at the bank, be right back’ (Tel Aviv 2012 ). At the opening night, for example, one of the family members played with the photographs that were hanging on one of the walls, and added to them photographs from another display. He explained what he was doing as a way to highlight an aspect of the late grandfa-
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how to do things with curatorship
ASAF KLIGER, I'M AT THE BANK, BE RIGHT BACK (2012) WITH A VISITOR'S INTERVENTION
ther that was expressed in the photograph that he replaced. What could have been an interruption of the project with a call to the security if it was an institutional exhibition in a museum was for me one of the highlights of the evening. That is because this unplanned intervention was serving my main purpose – to help the family with curatorship to overcome a death of a loved one. I remembered that my audience is first of all the family, and the fact that this family member has found in the exhibition a platform for himself to express his feelings and to feel better with his pain was a very positive effect. By not doing anything when I saw the intervention, and even preventing an attempt to stop it, I feel that I served my
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step #2 : pick a great purpose
SELAH, YOU WILL BE A BLESSING (2011) IN WOODSTOCK NEIGHBOURHOOD, CAPE TOWN
purpose better and did things with curatorship. See step 4 for more examples of curators embracing unplanned happenings. WARNING! SOMETIMES IN THE NAME OF STICKING TO YOUR PURPOSE YOU CAN FIND YOURSELF DECIDING TO STOP DOING YOUR CURATORIAL PROJECT The Woodstock murals project of Cape Town based street artist and curator Ricky Lee Gordon (Freddy Sam) can serve as a good example for that. Gordon curated a residency project, inviting street artists from around the world to paint murals in the Woodstock neighbourhood of Cape Town. His purpose was to improve the life of the
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how to do things with curatorship neighbourhood residents by ‘removing the greyness’ from the streets. The curatorial project attracted many international artists and turned the neighbourhood into an open museum. As Gordon told me in an inspiration-talk we held in January 2013, unfortunately for him, the murals contributed to the gentrification of the area that was expressed in inflation of real estate prices. Once he noticed that the project contradicts its original purpose of improving the life of the Woodstock residents, Gordon decided to reconsider its continuity. The connection between the arrival of artists in run-down neighbourhoods and the advent of the neighbourhood's gentrification is an important factor for you to consider if you plan to be a curator who does things with street art (Aagerstoun 2004: 162). WARNING! AS BANAL AS THIS MAY SOUND, TO CHOOSE A PURPOSE IS NOT AN EASY THING TO DO. I THINK WE WEREN’T EDUCATED TO ASK AND ANSWER SUCH QUESTIONS WHEN CHOOSING OUR NEXT PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT I personally found it very hard to choose a purpose from endless options of what project I wanted to curate for myself. And that open question boiled down for me to the ‘what is my purpose?’ question. ‘You speak broadly of social responsiveness but you indicate no particular area of concern – this models you as an idealist but with no
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step #2 : pick a great purpose place to put your energy specifically – hence eventually an unhappy idealist’ my supervisor pointed when I struggled with the question. And I knew she was right. What she suggested was asking: ‘What might the area be that you would most concern you? Gender issues, environmental, workers rights, animal welfare, HIV or whatever you want but you need a rudder for your concerns. This then allows you to source artists whose "If indicate no interests may feed into this’. particular area of concern – this For my curatorial project models you as an after that advice, I chose the idealist but with no purpose of inspiring people, place to put your stimulating others to think or energy specifically – act in creative ways they have hence eventually an dismissed before. This was the unhappy idealist" my first step of The Obs Academy supervisor pointed of Inspiration Officers that I out when I struggled opened with Zime Keswa in choosing a purpose September 2013 in my living room in a shared house in Observatory suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. That was my first official attempt to do things with curatorship, and I will refer to that example and analyse it in the next pages of the handbook
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how to do things with curatorship NOTES :
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HOW TO DO THINGS WITH CURATORSHIP SELF-HELP HANDBOOK FOR SOCIALY ENGAGED CURATORS By Valeria Geselev Hounours In Curatorship Michaelis School Of Fine Art University Of Cape Town 2013
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