The Curatorial The Curatorial A Philosophy of Curating Edited by Jean-Paul Martinon LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2013 © Jean-Paul Martinon and Contributors, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Jean-Paul Martinon has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. eISBN: 978-1-4725-2316-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The curatorial : a philosophy of curating / edited by Jean-Paul Martinon. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4725-2560-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN (invalid) 978-1-4725-3361-6 (ebook (epub)) – ISBN 978-1-4725-2316-7 (ebook (pdf)) 1. Curatorship–Philosophy. 2. Art museums–Philosophy. N410.C8697 2013 727’.701–dc23 2013024805. Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Contents List of Illustrations vii Preface Jean-Paul Martinon and Irit Rogoff viii Notes on Contributors xii Introduction Jean-Paul Martinon 1 Part I Send-Offs 1 On the Curatorial, From the Trapeze Raqs Media Collective 17 2 Theses in the Philosophy of Curating Jean-Paul Martinon 25 3 Whence the Future? Alfredo Cramerotti and Jean-Paul Martinon 35 4 The Expanded Field Irit Rogoff 41 5 Dear Art, Yours Sincerely Natasa Ilić (WHW) 49 Part II Praxeologies 6 The Curator Crosses the River: A Fabulation Stefan Nowotny 59 7 Becoming-Curator Suzana Milevska 65 8 An Exhausted Curating Leire Vergara 73 9 Eros, Plague, Olfaction: Three Allegories of the Curatorial Jenny Doussan 79 Part III Moves 10 The Task at Hand: Transcending the Clamp of Sovereignty Ariella Azoulay 93 11 The Simple Operator Sarah Pierce 97 12 Three Short Takes on the Curatorial Doreen Mende 105 13 Aku menjadi saksi kepada – What I am Thinking Roopesh Sitharan 109 14 Betrayal and the Curatorial – A Testimony for the Committee on the Curatorial Joshua Simon 115 vi Contents Part IV Heresies 15 A Conspiracy without a Plot Stefano Harney and Valentina Desideri 125 16 What does a Question Do? Micropolitics and Art Education Susan Kelly 137 17 Being Able to Do Something Nora Sternfeld 145 18 The Politics of Residual Fun Valeria Graziano 151 Part V Refigurations 19 Modern Art: Its Very Idea and the Time/Space of the Collection Helmut Draxler 163 20 Two Invoking Media: Radio and Exhibition Jean-Louis Déotte 169 21 In Unfamiliar Terrain Preliminary Notes towards Site-Relationality and the Curatorial Anshuman Dasgupta 173 22 Curating Ghostly Objects: Counter-Memories in Cinematic Space Cihat Arinç 183 23 Non-Museums Adnan Madani 197 Part VI Stages 24 Curating, Dramatization and the Diagram: Notes towards a Sensible Stage Bridget Crone 207 25 Curating Context Aneta Szyłak 215 26 Backstage and Processuality: Unfolding the Installation Sites of Curatorial Projects Ines Moreira 225 27 This Is Not About Us Je Yun Moon 235 Coda: The Curatorial Charles Esche 241 Bibliography 245 Index 253 Illustrations 10.1 Presentation of the archive From Palestine to Israel at Zochrot Gallery, Tel Aviv, 2009 93 14.1 Front page of the Israeli newspaper Maariv featuring Ariel Kleiner’s Guillotine installed on Rothschild Boulevard, Tel Aviv, 11 August 2011 116 17.1 Not Doing Everything, Poster, Buenos Aires, 2004 by the Argentinian collective etcetera 145 21.1 Installation view of the Alien Nation Project with participants and viewers, Rhenok, Sikkim, 2011 173 26.1 Stills from Telmo Domingues’s documentary, ‘Making of the Exhibition Buildings & Remnants’ 225 Preface Curatorial/Knowledge PhD Programme, Goldsmiths College We wish to talk about curating: about its potentials and its scopes. We wish to talk about curating: about the knowledges it builds on and the knowledges it produces. We wish to talk about curating: about its sociabilities, collectivities and convivialities. We wish to talk about curating: about its commitments to seeing, reading and speaking and exchanging as a form of public activity. We wish to talk about curating: because it has been seeking novel ways of instantiating the crises of our world in other modalities, of finding other ways to engage with our current woes. We wish to talk about curating, because we thought we saw a possibility nestling within its protocols, a possibility for other ways of working, relating and knowing. This wish of ours to talk about curating led us to institute a space of gathering, a practice-led PhD programme in 2006 called Curatorial/Knowledge to which many young curators and artists have come to share in the discussion and embark on their own investigations. Our friends and colleagues from many different arenas have also come along and held seminars and discussed their complex practices and intricate thought processes. At the very beginning, six years ago, someone said half-jokingly, ‘our project is to stop people curating!’ and some weeks later someone else said, a bit more vehemently: ‘so are we agreed that this programme is not about becoming better curators?’ With hindsight, these were actually statements of considerable substance, which recognized that the proliferation of curatorial activities, courses, residencies and prizes has led to massive activity, driven by energy and an enthusiasm for displays and events, much of which is less than fully considered. It also recognizes that all this activity is not founded on a solid intellectual basis that might empower its practitioners to have the critical courage to resist Preface ix demands to simply supply more and more excitement to a market ravenous for spectacle and entertainment. It has always been our desire to enter the discussion as ‘provocateurs’ rather than as ‘experts’ – we have understood that historical and other expertise is easily converted into the legitimation of market-driven spectacles and therefore cannot provide the self-reflexive speculation we continue to think the field requires if it is to become more than a series of professional protocols. Alongside these market-driven spectacles a whole gamut of curatorial activities take place, calling into question what it is that is really taking place underneath all this glitter. These activities have taken many shapes: for example, we have seen the entry of the pedagogical into the field under the aegis of ‘the educational turn’, the (re)animation of abandoned sites and the (re-)infiltration of existing institutions, and we have also witnessed a strong insistence on talking, conversing, discussing and reading, activities that are in themselves often understood as the very stuff of what it is to make things visible, legible and relevant. And so our discussions have taken place between these two quite opposite poles of what it means to work in the field, two poles whose differences have become increasingly accentuated – bowing to the expanding market on the one hand and an ever-increasing activist spirit within sectors of the worlds of art and artistic education. Initially we recognized a necessity to distinguish between ‘curating’ and ‘the curatorial’. If ‘curating’ is a gamut of professional practices that had to do with setting up exhibitions and other modes of display, then ‘the curatorial’ operates at a very different level: it explores all that takes place on the stage set-up, both intentionally and unintentionally, by the curator and views it as an event of knowledge. So to drive home a distinction between ‘curating’ and ‘the curatorial’ means to emphasize a shift from the staging of the event to the actual event itself: its enactment, dramatization and performance. ‘Curating’ takes place in a promise; it produces a moment of promise, of redemption to come. By contrast, ‘the curatorial’ is what disturbs this process; it breaks up this stage, yet produces a narrative which comes into being in the very moment in which an utterance takes place, in that moment in which the event communicates and says, as Mieke Bal once observed, ‘look, that is how this is’. So ‘the curatorial’ is a disturbance, an utterance, a narrative. And within this disturbance, works of art can no longer be a process of interpellation, a conscious or unconscious hailing by some internalized mode of knowledge. Instead, they x Preface engage in another process, that of precipitating our reflection, of encouraging another way of thinking or sensing the world. From being reactive to the world to precipitating another reflection on the world (and inevitably sparking ways to change the world), works of art reflect the myriad ways of being implicated in the world, not just as passive recipients, but as active members of a world that is never one with itself, always out of joint, out of place, but always intrinsically ours – of our own making. Not wishing to operate within a space of binary oppositions (art vs art history or practice vs theory, for example), we have brought in ‘the philosophical’, not as a master discipline or narrative to explain all, but as a slightly distantiated mode of reflection. This has enabled the introduction of a critical edge that maintains a somewhat sovereign position, detached from the seeming imperatives of everyday demands. The move to ‘the philosophical’ we have affected to enact is not a hierarchical conceit or the privileging of one kind of discipline or practice over another. It is simply the recognition that by bringing some strands of contemporary philosophical and theoretical thought to the discussion of ‘the curatorial’, we open the possibility of reflecting in a way that goes beyond the simple description of projects and experiences. Given the immense expansion of the field and of how central it has become to the visual arts and other modes of cultural practice, it seems to us that it is now imperative to develop a discourse that reaches outwards, beyond the professional milieu, and that allows itself to be challenged by some of the most complex and ethics-driven thought of our times. We would like to thank all the participants and guests who attended our seminars and the institutions that have hosted us, all of whom continue to contribute to our ongoing discussions. We would particularly like to thank our department at Goldsmiths, Visual Cultures, whose ethos of constant experimentation and testing whatever comes our way has been so hospitable to establishing new programmes that perform the urgencies of the culture we live in. From the moment we established the Curatorial/Knowledge programme, we fell into an ongoing conversation that meandered in many directions and has moved us all, quite unawares, along with it. We probably have not changed the field very significantly, but we have certainly established a conversation about ‘the curatorial’ that has challenged all of us. What follows includes some of the voices that were heard during the first five years of the programme. This volume does not pretend to be a complete