By Kenneth Tay
#1. It is
common practice that artists collaborate with other artists to create ideas and
artworks. Increasingly, such approaches are deployed between artists and
curators. The exhibition produced out of such contexts can sometimes be
regarded as artworks. It is not uncommon for artists to be curators, and
curators to be artists. Explore the notions of a ‘curatorial community’. (6 Modules)
Collaborative practices between artists are nothing new, however
tempting it is to fetishize the Internet as the great enabler today. In fact,
there is a tendency to invoke a continuum between contemporary collaborative
practices and modernist art collectives (such as the Dadaists or the
Surrealists). But as Nikos Papastergiadis notes, the “precursors of
contemporary forms of collaborations were incomplete or partial manifestations,
insofar as they failed to develop the organizational potential” necessary to
radically position collectivization as a vital and primary artistic solution
(160). Today, supercharged by the global imperative of speed and with the
Internet as its apotheosis, collaborations between artists are coming thick and
fast.
At the risk of invoking a cliché
here, globalization has ‘shrunk’ temporal and spatial distances not without the
help of new information technologies. This has led to increased encounters and
confluences between communities spread out across the world and consequently,
that of networks between artists to be formed at an encouraging frequency. For
that reason, dialogues between artists have frequently gone beyond the
provincial, the local, or the parochially defined. Rather than the usual
romanticized myth of the artist as a heroic figure critiquing the immediate
community s/he is embedded in, contemporary collaborative practices have
witnessed artists from (ostensibly) disparate communities coming together, at
least momentarily, to engage in a common cause or interest. To paraphrase the
curator Okwui Enwezor here, collaborative practices today are much more
project-based than permanent alliances established between different artists
(Papastergiadis 165). The implication here is that the flexibility of
membership in contemporary collaborations has privileged a ‘blitzkrieg’ effect
that the modernists could never quite pull off. But more importantly, Enwezor’s
observation recalls what Gayatri Spivak terms as “strategic essentialism”.
Spivak’s term is particularly useful here since it suggests that groups with
different views or political ends can nevertheless band together in order to
rally for a common and provisional ground forward, through a “strategic use of
essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” (205). In other
words, collaborations on a short term basis have allowed today’s artists to
take progressive steps forward, and often in quick successions, rather than
remaining static in the obstinate insistence of irreducible differences between
one another.
This comes hardly as a surprise,
given how much of twentieth-century critical discourses have often attacked the
cult of the individual as perpetuated by the bourgeois ideals of liberal
humanism -- which, it needs to be said, has not left us entirely just yet
(Barry 30-35). The ‘collaborative turn’ in contemporary art is very much a late
descendent of this movement, with the emphasis on the collective spearheading
the critique of globalization and its discontents. If the typical account of
globalization presupposes a homogenization, it has only conveniently masked
over the fault-lines that global capitalism has created and maintained [1].
That is to say, the homogenizing effect of globalization has only exacerbated
the need to assert differences, or in fact radical differences, and further
complicated by the capitalist injunction to ‘be yourself’. In other words,
globalization is much more devastating when it encourages a recourse to
irreducible (local) differences. To remain adamant of one’s individuality
against the backdrop of global homogenization is to fall right into the chasms.
Therefore, collaborations between artists today must be seen as an attempt not
to liquidate local differences, but to strategically navigate between
differences and common political motivations, and to mount an attack against a
global order that insists perversely on the dichotomy between the global and
the local, between pure homogeneity and absolute differences.
Another reason behind the political
efficacy of today’s collaborative practices among artists has been the
de-specialization of artistic disciplines and professions [2].
From the artist-curator to the interdisciplinary artist, it is becoming
increasingly rare to find artists today who are merely involved in one project,
or a singular medium for the matter. Although it is unclear and certainly
debatable whether this has necessarily led to ‘lesser’ art being produced, the
political implications of de-specialization are much less so. In his criticism
of modernism’s avant-garde practices, Jürgen Habermas argued that the distance
between “expert cultures and the general public has increased. What the
cultural sphere gains through specialized treatment and reflection [as per the
modernists] does not automatically come
into possession of everyday practice without more ado” (45, italics in original).
I should probably add that this is not an attempt to rehash or recapitulate the
infamous Habermas-Lyotard debate over the role of art in the post/modern.
Having said that, it is worthwhile here to pursue Habermas’ criticism since it
does suggest that de-specialization affords a resistance against hermetic
practices amongst artists further exacerbated by an appetite for theoretical
complications and neologisms. For that reason, de-specialization should be
greeted as a welcomed movement since it keeps artists and their practices much
closer to the ground instead of flying off on solipsistic flights of the
tangential imagination. If esoteric specialization on the part of individual
artists had often closed off the doors for potential collaborations, de-specialization
encourages a fluidity that consequently favours collaborative practices. Put
crudely, de-specialization provides greater access and involvement. Here, I
would like to suggest that it is perhaps much more useful to understand
individuals working under the aegis of de-specialization today as ‘cultural
producers’. It should be noted of course that de-specialization does not end
solely as a deterritorialization of an artistic discipline; but rather, it also
involves a reterritorialization or reconfiguration that avoids the impasses or
deadlocks of disciplined constipation. In this sense, artistic or technical
disciplines are deterritorialized and reterritorialized into a more general
notion of cultural (co)production. Before one speaks of a ‘curatorial
community’ then, it is important to recognize the solidarity that potentially
emerges the minute one sees him or herself first as a fellow cultural producer
motivated by a common cause of proffering the best of what has been thought or
said.
If one were to take recourse to the
etymology of the word ‘curate’, it would lead us down the path of ‘caring’.
Would this solidarity between fellow cultural producers encapsulate precisely
this compassion? Instead of disciplined insularity, a curatorial community is
one that encourages a dialogical engagement with one another’s thoughts and
works. This is not to suggest that everyone rubs and lubes up the right way in
the naive sense - i.e. “oh everything is so wonderful here!” On the contrary, a
curatorial community is one where members would not hesitate to go all the way
in their criticisms of one another. I am not invoking a tough love policy, but
I do believe that honest criticism is the most basic courtesy that goes a long
way for a curatorial community -- if the emphasis should be placed on care and
compassion. It may also be said that members of a curatorial community function
as interlocutors or catalysts for one another. In that sense, I would like to
think of the curatorial community as one that is constantly in the backdrop of
collaborative practices today: While the latter may be orientated around short
term projects and goals, it is the former’s continued emphasis on compassion
that precedes and exceeds every iteration of the latter. After all, it has to
be readily admitted that even within the strategic essentialism that
characterizes contemporary collaborations, there is always going to be a group
or voice that dominates. It would therefore be disingenuous to pretend that
there would not be any asymmetry within the collaborative. But this
would not justify a call to abandon the project; rather, it only means that
members must care enough not only for one another’s common interests, but also
care enough to know when to leave or to concede to one another that their
collective dream might well be over. This, I claim, would be the ‘spirit’ of
the curatorial community which comes back to an engagement with the cult of the
individual, or the myth of the individual talent/genius, that is still working
in tandem with globalization today to devastating effects. Within the
curatorial community then is a mixture of artists, curators, critics, etc. who
fundamentally look at themselves as co-producers of meanings -- and perhaps
much more importantly, co-producers of a culture where care extends beyond the
respective objects/objectives and onto one another.
To conclude, I would just to draw
attention also to the way the word ‘curate’ has been thrown around to cover
anything from the custodianship of museums and galleries down to cafes claiming
to serve only ‘curated coffees’. The latter case is much more than a marketing
strategy based on its alliterative effect; in fact, it suggests that the word
‘curate’ has become the word par
excellence to describe a thoughtful selection or an exercise in good taste
against the cultural white noise that we are flooded with in today’s
highly-mediatized society. First though, consider what critic JJ Charlesworth
observes of the recent fascination with curating:
This increase in attention is not merely the product of a more acute
sensitivity to the appointment of people to powerful positions within art’s
institutions, although that does have something to do with it, especially with
the unprecedented expansions of venues for the presentation of contemporary art
that has characterized the last ten years, a trend particularly evident in the
growth of international biennial exhibitions. More significant, however, is the
attention paid to the character of the curatorial endeavour itself, as
something not innocent or neutral, but loaded ideologically, epistemologically
and institutionally, and in which a consideration of such implications are
explicitly rehearsed by curators themselves. (92)
History (and even etymology itself) has shown that the
meaning of a word is bound to change over time, subjected to local parole. It
would therefore be rather silly to hold on obstinately to an immutable meaning of the word ‘curate’. Having said that, it still seems necessary, to me, that
a curatorial community must in the first place care, and care enough, about the
semantics of the word ‘curate’ itself, least the word becomes yet another
signifier so defused of meaning as to find itself signifying everything and
nothing all at once. According to Charlesworth, the word ‘curating’ is “a
neologism so recent that dictionaries have not yet caught up” (91). While I am
not about to suggest that a curatorial community play the role of a zealous
‘thought police’ guarding over its sacred word, it does seem to me only logical
to propose that the first order of the day for any curatorial community is to
care about the very word that defines the identity of the community -- i.e. to
pay attention not only to how the word is being used, abused, and stretched out
so far as to disappear beyond the vanishing point of its hermeneutic horizon.
For that reason, ‘curating’ is the first object that a curatorial community
necessarily must be a custodian over. Obviously, the difference between authority
and custodianship must be maintained here. While it may be the curatorial
community’s prerogative to guard against a potential atrophy of the word
itself, there must be, at the same time, this insistence of maintaining the
yet-to-be-determined future of the word ‘curate’ itself. This is, I think, the
bare minimum, the ground zero, of curating.
Bibliography
Barry, Peter. Beginning
Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 3rd ed. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2009. Print.
Charlesworth, JJ. "Curating Doubt" Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance. Ed. Michele Sedgwick
and Judith Rugg. Bristol: Intellect, 2007. Print. 91-99.
Habermas, Jurgen. "Modernity: An Unfinished Project" Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.
Ed. Maurizio Passerin d'Entreves and Seyla Benhabib. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997. Print. 38-55.
Hall, Stuart. "The Local and the Global: Globalization and
Ethnicity" Culture, Globalization, and the World-System.
Ed.
Anthony D. King. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Print. 19-40.
Papastergiadis, Nikos. Cosmopolitanism
and Culture. Cambridge: Polity, 2012. Print.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen, 1987. Print.
[1] As Stuart Hall notes, globalization
always involves both homogenization and the creation of new differences; it
engenders a “double movement” that is both “local and global at the same
moment” (27).
[2] In this, I am also suggesting that
every artistic production or collaboration is inescapably a political gesture
insofar as it is always already an active intervention. Or to put it more
succinctly, it is the “active and partisan nature of presentation”
(Charlesworth 92).
