The Nu-Curator
Aesthetics, in it's advanced state, formerly existed at a subdued level in the culture. However with technological developments a magnified realm of aesthetics has effervesced into the day-to-day. The world of art acts as a subsidiary to the globalised engine rooms of design, advertising and marketing - orbiting the spectacularised culture. In the 'developed world' the conjoining of the media industries with that of utilities has reached protean dimensions, the announcement of the commodity being all pervasive. In this sense, the condition of the contemporary art curator becomes transparent - their 'job' is to broker. At best they can only select and present menus of 'interesting' commodities and the gallery/site is only another trading post. Furthermore, this condition is highly resilient to change, having been galvanised from the Reformation onwards. Resistance is absorbed time and time again by Capital as a form of anti-heroism. Curationism, on the other hand involves Nu-Curators as performers, unfettered by preceding art-form criteria or packaged notions of 'live-art' or interdisciplinarity. The Nu-Curator as performer understands that the commodification includes all human behaviour and they are obliged to consider their own performativity as 'already aestheticised'.
Nu-Curators work with individuals from various walks of life to construct spatial debates which lay bare the conditions of possibility for future human agency. A sustained activity of this nature has broad implications. It might suggest a relationship to the vicinity, based not on the limited and naturalised notions of 'community arts', but rather on new forms of co-operation. This vernacular approach roots an initiative within its immediate surroundings without losing sight of foreign relations. The combination is discursive, existing as a sculptural performance in which social processes become the very substance of work.
A range of material forms may pass through a Nu-Curator's practise but there is no dependency upon iconic or reified objecthood. Nu-Curators must not be confused with artists who have worked with the idea (or form) of the Museum. The Nu-Curator's work is not focused as a critical reflection on the existing system of art (although it may indirectly do so). Nu-Curators are involved in building new-systems of cultural production in which critical events emerge beyond the existing terms of art. This construction is one in which everyone is considered experientially well versed, regardless of age, background or culture ('everyone' is not 'an artist' but everyone does have experience).
Curationism harnesses aspects of the collecting impulses found within the histories of the collection and curating in which the notion of specialism is not fixed. Human 'necessity' exists at the core of its practice, along with lay-work beyond that of the academy. It adds to the blurring of subject/object which can be found nascent within much pre-industrial ritual and it siphons certain approaches to negation in C20th fine art practice to form, in the first instance, a meta-aesthetics of curating. At this early stage in the development of Curationism, the Nu-Curator may appear to embody a highly advanced form of artistic production under the mantle of politicised organiser or activist. At this stage they may be understood as 'ecologists' in the sense that they work from the position that there is already too much art in the world. Curationism is then a performance which is aimed ambitiously at navigating the rubric of global capital. It is this injection of performance into the field of curating, administration and taxonomy that will make, at once naïve and redundant, the role of the artist and their bureaucracy.
