Identified Curating
The curators' orthodox antecedents as outlined previously are to be found in the 'cabinets of curiosity' of Renaissance Europe. The C17th French 'curieux' who acquired specimens and artefacts for aristocratic encyclopaedic collections took on increasingly secular and roving motivations as a result of enlightenment thinking. The recent rise of the 'artist-curator' is no less classically oriented. The term suggests at best a possible fusion or critical interface between the two roles. However in practice both have remained distinctly unchanged. When this character is not busy reaffirming reified objecthood in the studio as 'artist' they are on the phone or at openings developing a far from vernacular connoisseurship. Curating under these conventional terms involves a 'base-pragmatism' (which amounts to gross opportunism). Firstly, to break into the market the curator needs to 'champion' as many key artists as possible, as quickly as possible, and to this end lists of suitable practitioners must be drawn up towards a group show. Some of these will be artists who have gained recognition elsewhere - their names might be located in the recent ad-pages of visual arts' magazines (A list of the world's top thirty younger artists can be drawn up by searching through a selection of these in one hour). These are mixed with the artist-curator's artist-friends who may have had little or no recognition (most of the curators' peers will also be involved in organising exhibitions and will probably return the favour). This process is refined over time as the artist-curator gains credence and stature via the media.Curating might well be, (as Jean Baudrillard has suggested of 'collecting') a discourse directed at oneself whereby the individual reifies their personal interests in the form of an exhibition. The exhibition is the means by which the curator says 'I am of it'. The curator, although not always visible, is at the centre of the exhibition. Baudrillard's position views collecting as part of an aesthetic process, a collection being the creation of a taxonomy which revolves around the collector's interiority and sociality. Interrelatedness might then emerge as a key aspect of curating in which that which is curated exists as an entity greater than the sum of its parts. Herein, the collector/curator shows their hand, in participation, to be pro-active in the collection/exhibitionary process. Curating then denotes a level of empowerment, in which the 'I' of the curator subsumes the authority of both artist and object. Any discursive agency lying nascent within this model is restricted by the terms of a globalised art market. There is nothing new or radical in the practices of independent galleries in London nor in the freelance activities of roving curators across the globe. As a practice it is positioned comfortably within the terms of western mercantilism. Freelance curating appears as a shift away from more traditional institutional models of Fine Art Administration but is no less conservative in its process of institutionalising practices as art.
Jacques Derrida’s work on the 'archive' has investigated the concept as being located in the idea of the house: the Greek word 'arkheion' being the house or residence of the superior magistrate. From this domestic location of authority Derrida begins to view the archive as lying between the public and the private, and between the coldness of the law and the intimacy of the home. He suggests the process of collecting and archiving (with insistence upon distance and dislocation from the immediate and the actual) effects and colours the very body of material which is being scrutinised. The archive can only ever be a distorted lens through which phenomena is addressed. With the advent of e-mail, an instantaneous mode of communication, untold stress is placed upon the idea of the collection. It threatens received ways of ordering material with destruction (Freud's ‘death drive’). What ensues is Derrida’s ‘archive fever’: a race against the instant and a plea for a distancing from phenomena. It is this fear; that the virtual world and the digital 'revolution' might destroy material culture as we know it (and with it the collection and curator) that suggests why the wave of nostalgia industries has been so widespread at the end of the last century.
Are the 'material' and 'virtual' so dislocated? Or are we entering a new phase of material culture where actuality and representation become one? Pure content? The collection of the moment?
A Nu-curating without artist or programmer.
