My Presentation to the Curating Group - Tom Trevatt

Nothing Will Have Taken Place But The Place

In light of the project that I will present here today, I want to begin to find a way to re-think what we call presentation, display, or, if you like, by a stretch of the imagination, by a leap of faith, curation. What I am presenting has previously been named Manque Manque, has come to be named The And/Or Project and will be named something other at some point in the future. For now I am happy to let The And/Or Project title the activity I am engaged in. As always, more on naming later. In truth, we might like to think we never leave the process of naming, that what we actually do is always involved somehow in an act of nomination or, indeed, denomination, that a curatorial practice is a practice of coining, of an apprehension of currency. Curation acts doubly to bring into being the display, to name display as such, and to lend the display currency. To nominate and denominate.

The question would be where to begin? Where to begin with some thing that has already begun? In this sense this presentation is always already a re-presentation and just a representation, but also only a presentation. It is a re-presentation and representation of the project but a presentation of itself. This will only ever have been a presentation of the presentation; nothing will have taken place but the place.

Last year Rob and I were approached by Claire Scanlon, an artist and tutor at Northbrook College. She had this idea for a show called Manque Manque. Broadly this was a show that took its subject matter as lack, or failure. We adopted the show, the title and the group she had assembled prior to our involvement. In this sense we gave up certain ‘rights’ claimable as part of curation. This has extended to the working group. We have decided that it should not be just us who choose the members of the group, but let a diffuse activity of word of mouth invitations to occur, so anyone already in the group can invite anyone else. In this way, we are taking a passive role in the formulation of the group. We are not concerned with choosing artwork that fits into a theme or idea, the social group is formed first and we work, through a series of collaborations, around this idea of displaying something. So, at some point to come some things will be visible and among other things we will produce something we would recognise as a group show. We shall also produce these other ‘things’. Other objects.

Talks

Demonstrations

Discussions

Events

Walks

Meetings

Drawings

Writing

Sculptures

Maps

Documents

Exhibitions

Residencies

&c.

In this presentation I want to tentatively put forward certain propositions. Ways to embark on a re-think of, or to pull out perhaps what is un-thought in curation. This debate has, in some form been started elsewhere, however, I don’t think it has been truly played out.

In an essay for Art Monthly in 2005 Paul O’Neill tells us:

Self-reflexivity […] is fast becoming the buzz-word.

Exhibition curating has become self-reflexive about self-reflexivity itself. We are becoming so self-reflexive that exhibitions often end up as nothing more or less than art exhibitions curated by curators curating curators, curating artists, curating artworks, curating exhibitions.

Which sounds like we need less curating not more. What this boils down to, for O’Neill is a rather turgid account of what could be seen as the endgame of curatorial practice played out by the likes of Jens Hoffman with his ‘London in Six Easy Steps’ show or ‘Artists Favourites: Act I and II’. In the latter, which pretty much does as the title suggests, collects a selection of artwork based on artists favourites, Art & Language mounted a text panel on a plinth reading:

In appearing to make a real distinction between artist and curator the organisers have proposed a single negation: “artists are not curators” In fact, the curatorial presence in the exhibition has been doubled. The result is a double negative: the artist is simply not not a curator. And that’s in fact how it is. A different type of work is needed if we are to reshape the distinction and reintroduce a critical negation.

At a recent discussion at the ICA titled ‘The Artist-curator: curators as artists and artists as curators’, where Mark Sladen, Jeremy Millar, Gavin Wade, Siobhan Wootton and Cameron Cartiere proposed a discussion around the potentially interesting question of the discursive limits of curating, not much reasoned discussion of these limits actually took place. Instead each of them discussed their practice suggesting that, perhaps, and lets not get carried away, they were acting a little like artists, or that artists sometimes acted like curators.

What seems to be under discussion in these examples is not the discursive limits of curatorial practice but the ability of a curator or artist to nominate themselves one thing or another. It is, in fact, a discussion about subjectivity and social roles and not about what is proper to curating. It is whether artists can be curators or curators artists. It is a question of transdisciplinarity and agency. This isn’t an interesting enough proposition. As we are aware the strength of art is in its ability to think outside itself. Its ability to constantly form and reform its limits to accommodate the its exteriority. Because of art’s ability to reconstitute itself the proposition that a curator could be an artist or an artist a curator has no cultural value, this isn’t even in play. What, however, I would suggest, is in play, is the question of the limits of curation. What my proposition, come the end of this presentation, will amount to, is a re-think of those limits, what can be claimed for curation and what is outside it. What I’d like to suggest, ever so quietly so no-one quite hears me, is that curation has the same ability as art to re-constitute itself, has the same ability to think outside its discursive limits, the ability to think what is not proper to it. That instead of discourse around transdisciplinarity of artists or curators, I am suggesting that a curator remains in their specific discipline and thinks outside it from within.

What, ultimately I want to suggest is a curatorial practice that has no recourse to art. And we should think here of recourse as a retreat, a return, a run from, a back to, a looking for assistance from. So, what I am proposing is a curating that does not rely on art to do its work for it.

From the press release of Andrew Renton’s show last year, Stay Forever and Ever and Ever, we read the following:

this vibrant group exhibition will bring together works by 11 international

contemporary artists, whose practices involve assembling objects that connote feelings of nostalgia. At the heart of the exhibition is a discussion around the idea that memories and objects are inexplicably linked; that our memories are stored within objects and objects arouse our memories

And from a press report in Artforum:

It was barely under way when Renton himself swept in with the panache of an Italian playboy—Savile Row jacket and good, no, great, shoulder-length curly hair. Striding over to a huge vase of flowers atop a plinth at the center of the room, he tweaked the blossoms. (This turned out to be the show’s central work, de Rijke/de Rooij’s Bouquet II, 2003.) “I’m always telling my MA students that curating is not flower arranging,” he deadpanned. At best, curating a good group show is tricky; at worst, it is summertime program filler. Occasionally, though, a curator has a vision so focused and thought-through that the artworks come together in one glorious, lyric aria.

(http://artforum.com/diary/archive=200705)

Or, say from the press release of Laughing in a Foreign Language:

Laughing in a Foreign Language explores the role of laughter and humour in contemporary art […] it investigates the whole spectrum of humour, from jokes, gags and slapstick to irony and satire

The approach we find in common amongst these and other diverse exhibitions is the curator as some kind of auteur, picking artworks to support or challenge their vision, thesis or theme. In Inconsequential Bayonets Mark Hutchinson and David Beech discuss various descriptions of the curator. One example they pull out regarding the reliance of the curator on artworks is of an email exchange with a young curator:

His curatorial strategy - which is not uncommon - seems to involve coming up with a vague framework and hoping that the artists will save his blushes. When confronted by this he said, “I trust the capability of critical/engaged/political cultural producers to express any thoughts, concerns and solutions regarding the ‘theme’ with their work”.

This recourse or retreat to art is common. In the shows I mentioned briefly above and many others the curator may develop an idea they want to explore, say laughter in different cultures or nostalgia, then select and organise artworks that they see as working with these ideas. This model, however puts the artwork in an anterior position, foregrounding it’s dominance in the cultural field. What this model doesn’t think, though, is the possibility of curating whereby artwork and curating may work collaboratively with no greater value placed on one or the other. Because, no matter how strong a curatorial idea may be, at the final reckoning the artwork takes primacy. This is of course for many number of cultural or economic reasons, the artwork maintains some commodity or exchange value or has become or will become a historically or culturally valuable object. This fetishism, in Marxist terms, of the art object, however, in my formulation must be rejected.

The exhibition Klutterkammer, curated by John Bock at the ICA in November 2004 can provide an interesting discussion here. Within an architecturally cluttered space, replete with crawl spaces, corridors, hay bales, badly built concrete rooms, trap doors, ladder, steps and the like Bock has curated a show of artworks that have influenced him. By, amongst others Matthew Barney, Vito Acconci, Sarah Lucas, Martin Kippenberger, Rasputin, Dr. Jane Rendell, John Maynard Keynes, Raymond Roussel, etc etc. Apprehending work in this frenzied space becomes like encountering a barely remembered acquaintance whilst drunk. One is pushed into such close proximity to the work, and other people, that there is no room given to quiet contemplation. Instead, you are forced into a too rapid dialogue. A review on e-flux website has it thus:

Avoiding a single position that attempts to rationalize contemporary art or thinking, Bock has created an unrestricted installation full of intentional inconsistencies that never aims at reaching any form of conclusion but rather resembles the often confusing realities of contemporary society

However, and this for me is where Bock fell short of what could have been made of the opportunity, the artworks were still given space within which to be displayed. The museum’s responsibility to the work was maintained, one wasn’t allowed to sit on Lucas’ chair, guards were in attendance to prevent an over excited audience repeating the ‘hazardous’ mistakes of Robert Morris’ 1971 Tate show. But, I think the key is that there was obvious spatial distinction between the architecture and the work. The work maintained a certain agency that the other stuff in the gallery didn’t, it was given space. The corridors, crawl spaces, hay bales etc were just support for the work. Just an extended frame. They never became truly work, always acting institutionally as gallery paraphernalia gone mad as it were. One could, but we don’t have space for it here, mount a discussion of the supportive, supplementary nature of this curatorial work in terms of the Derridean figure of the parergon. Indeed we could put this argument to very productive work elsewhere.

As counterpoint to Bock’s exhibition is Christoph Buchel’s Simply Botiful at the Hauser & Wirth Coppermill site in 2006. This enormous narrative-like installation looks like a post-nuclear holocaust construction. Many differing and confusing stories are played out in the plenitude of waste, decay, home furnishings, car parts, factory goods, lorries, tunnels, corridors, etc. As the press release describes it:

Cramped tunnels, claustrophobic chambers and frequent dead-ends induce feelings of panic and paranoia. [Buchel] explores the unstable relationship between security and internment, placing visitors in the brutally contradictory roles of victim and voyeur

Buchel’s total artwork, and we may think of the reference to total war that this brings up, is, of course, not an act of curating, he makes large scale installations in the style of Kabakov or Mike Nelson. Recall Kabakov’s coining of the term total installation:

[One] is simultaneously both a ‘victim’ and a viewer, who on the one hand

surveys and evaluates the installation, and on the other, follows those associations, recollections which arise in him[;] he is overcome by the intense atmosphere of the total illusion

But, Buchel could be used as an interesting model. Within his installation certain objects and artifacts take on mythical status, displayed at times in glass cases, or in cabinets, on tables like Steve Claydon’s objects in his ‘Strange Events…’. They operate for Buchel as signifiers, taking part in his twisted compendium of dislocating narratives. Could they be seen to operate as individual artworks, Buchel both the curator and sole artist of a maniacal group show? I think I just want to leave that question hanging. But the implication of that is that we might just start to think that curation and artwork can operate together in some way.

For the last four or so years I have been developing a questioning of the exhibition through a reading of Levinasian ethics. The idea I kept coming back to was the face-to-face relation, whereby, in this relationship, Levinas posits our absolute responsibility to the other. In Levinas the other is other only if he expresses the absolute other, the divine other. A relation to the other, then, is a relation to infinity, God, the absolute other, ethics is a transcendental relation. Our responsibility to this other then is a matter of ‘unconditional obedience’, ‘trauma’, ‘obsession’ and ‘persecution’. In this relation the other is absolved of the responsibility we are held to by its partially transcendent position. This thought allows us to think curating as a form of responsibility to the artwork as other. That within our relation to the artwork we have absolute responsibility, unconditional obedience, trauma, obsession and persecution; within the artwork is the face of the infinite. There can be no restitution. Which is why, in the final analysis, we allow the artwork the privileged position it craves.

However, maybe the thought of Alain Badiou, can let us think curating a different way. Badiou’s central claim against what he calls the ‘ethical ideology’ of Levinas, Derrida, Spivak and the like is that this type of thought, that posits us as ultimately culpable in front of the other leads to a universalising claim of the absolute respect for otherness. He suggests that “no one can enter the public realm without the declarations of others on their lips”. This Kantian imperative implies, as Badiou suggests, that we agree to organise philosophy and ethics around the prevention of suffering and death. Which becomes ethics as the management of human rights; whereby the other is seen as always in need of protection from injustice. We are ultimately obliged to avoid the suffering of the other at all costs. This negative conception of ethics is a position Badiou cannot accept:

The status of victim, of suffering beast, of emaciated dying individual, reduces man to his animal substructure, to his pure and simple identity as dying …Neither mortality nor cruelty can define the singularity of the Human within the world of the living.

Badiou refuses to accept the position that violence is somehow outside thought, that it is unproblematically conceived as elsewhere. Violence and risk of disaster is instead inherent within genuine thought. And must be conceived as such if we are to understand interpersonal relations. Within the ethical ideology violence comes from outside and we must protect the other from it, within Badiou’s position, the relation to another always already implies a violence of representation. But to exclude the rule of violence from the social and posit it as outside thought, or, as Adorno and Lyotard suggest, that Auschwitz was an “interruption to thought”, we are in danger of radically misunderstanding it. Badiou asserts, for example, that Auschwitz was an expression of political thought and must be confronted as such.

This position is supported by Pierre Saint-Armand in his book Laws of Hostility where he asserts that enlightenment thought, where humanity was involved in an absolute reconfiguration of the social through an understanding of man as infinitely perfectible, towards rationality and reason and away from baser animalistic violence, does not allow a thinking of violence within it. Saint-Armand’s claim is that the enlightenment, and by extension contemporary democracy which is founded on similar principles, refuses to accept the antagonism inherent in human reciprocity and as such misunderstands exchange.

Although Enlightenment philosophers have an idealized view of reciprocity as a transparent act of communication between one subject and another, their writings illustrate its negative possibilities for transformation and complexity. Reciprocity thus mutates into rivalrous strategies; it evolves into competition; it feeds on violence.

What Badiou allows me to think in relation to a curatorial project such as this is a move away from an ‘ethical ideology’, towards an understanding of Badiouian ethics that thinks the violence inherent in social relations. This is not to say that one becomes violent, or does violence to the other, but more that one does not leave these elements of relationality unthought. As Saint-Armand suggests the enlightenment project and by extension a liberal democracy that posits terror, violence, torture outside of the rationality of contemporary exchange, does not allow for the very thing that constitutes social exchange; the violence of the face. Badiou asserts:

The whole ethical predication based upon recognition of the other must purely and simply be abandoned.

So, where does that leave practice? Well, what it allows me to think is a curatorial practice that has no recourse to art. No retreat as such, the artwork no longer occupies the position of absolute other that needs my unconditional obedience. Where curating could act something like a gesture, alongside art. With art. The relation between art and curating, the ethical, as Badiou puts it, is thought as an ethics of situation. Each ethical situation comes to be judged not by some categorical imperative but in the absolutely unreducible singularity of situations.

In this system art is allowed to freely change position with support or frame, the space is subject to radical fragmentation, the artwork will get caught up in these fragmentations. It allows us to think in terms of what we have named, an interruptive curatorial practice, whereby curating comes to interrupt the field. Within this rupture perhaps something other is produced that operates dialectically to allow a rethinking of the discursive limits of curatorial practice. What this type of practice could look like though is still up for grabs.