Curatorial identity
In the past several months, as someone still young and developing a curatorial career, I cannot help but reflect on the idea of curatorial identity. While much has been made and said about artistic identity, curatorial identity certainly possesses similar attributes — with its manifestations and delineations making for interesting considerations.
It is interesting for example to pose the question— how flexible is the identity of a curator vs. that of an artist? Curators often need to specialize and develop an area of practice and research, similar to artists who develop themes in their work. Just as frequently perhaps, curators work site-specifically. Like artists who are commissioned to make a work within a certain context and set parameters, curators too get commissioned and develop exhibitions and projects context-responsive to the opportunity at hand, working to manifest this usually at a pre-given location with the commissioning organization.
Like artists, curators may also become known for working with certain media. Lately, I have been developing research and practice in Philippine video art with that conscious decision and self-initiation sparking much of this rumination. Like artists, I have also become afraid of labels. There is always the fear of being pigeonholed when one’s own interests are much more expansive than the certain area being concentrated on. There is much else that I desire to engage in, themes not bound by the specifics of either medium or geography.
Yet, perhaps the most fascinating area of comparison lies in the output or products of curatorial and artistic investigations. In a casual discussion I was at among some curators last year, one pointed out that the difference between the artist and the curator is that the curator cannot have his or her own artwork, a distinction I certainly find intriguing. A curator may produce research, writing, events and exhibitions yet cannot have an artwork in the same sense that artists do. The curator’s medium is the exhibition. For this reason, in certain ways the curator manages to evade the consumerism and object-fetish of collectors. While collectors may buy the artworks included in an exhibition precisely because they were validated at the selection of a curator (a situation occurring if the curator were already of a certain reputation), the exhibition itself cannot really be purchased. This is due to the physical installation of the works in a certain space, a critical consideration of the curator that can vary in significance from the nominal aesthetic to the absolutely fundamental. While artists’ works like installation and performance art can have their own acquisition challenges, the curators’ works have the additional circumstances in that their works — exhibitions — are at the identity of others, the artists who make the artworks.
It is also appealing to delve into the crossovers. A number of artists go on to develop curatorial practice, at least in part due to their ability to write, conceptualize, organize exhibitions and have a gifted eye. It could as well though be the manifestation of something further. It could stem perhaps from a discontent of institutions or being limited to one’s own artistic practice, necessitating to extend one’s breath to include others. It may also be symptomatic of deeper conditions. University of the Philippines’ Dr. Patrick Flores organized such an exhibition as part of his contribution to the 2008 Gwangju Biennale’s Position Papers. Called “Turns in Tropics,” the show focused on four Southeast Asian artist-curators, Raymundo Albano (Philippines, 1947-1985), Redza Piyadasa (Malaysia, 1939-2007), Apinan Poshyananda (Thailand, Lives in Bangkok) and Jim Supangkat (Indonesia, Lives in Bandung), representing as the project described, “artists, who in the late ’60s and ’80s turned toward curating in order to grapple with the vexations of the inter/national and to provoke reconsiderations of the artist as intellectual, while doing away with the binary separation of spaces of artistic and curatorial practice.” It is this transition that Flores associates a turn from a modern to a contemporary practice.
It is a component as well of contemporary practice that the status of the curator has risen. Previously, in the mid-20th century, the art critic was god with Clement Greenberg being viewed as its epitome. The critic, however, later became eclipsed by the curator, embodied by Harald Szeemann, who curated one of the most studied exhibitions in recent history, “Documenta 5” (1972), which went beyond art into the larger cultural field.
It seems though that the shift in power from the critic to curator is a shift of the critic towards a more artistic role. Whereas the critic is expected to give his opinion in the form of writing after seeing the finished work, in the curator’s guise the critic has expanded to become a part of the artistic production. In this adjacent position, he discusses with the artists at hand, gives estimation to their ideas and carries influence in the materialization of the outcome. It is an authority and, certainly I believe, a trust, that is given before and during rather than after the fact. While much has been said about artists at the mercy of the curators, I think at critics’ hands the artists occupy a more vulnerable position, being unable to respond to the exhibition reviewed within that same exhibition, considered completed.
It is though the degree of influence of the curator that artists find some heat. In “Documenta 5,” Szeemann was accused by the artist Daniel Buren of occluding the identity of the artists by subjecting their art to his own idea, that of the exhibition. This tension between curators and artists continues to contemporary times as indicative of a recent paper published in e-flux titled “Art without Artists?” Concerned that curators are undercutting artistic sovereignty, Anton Vidokle, an artist himself, wrote, “I feel that whereas artists’ engagement with a range of social forms and practices not normally considered part of the vocabulary of art serves to open up the space of art and grant it increased agency, curatorial and institutional attempts to re-contextualize their own activities as artistic—or generalize art into a form of cultural production — has the opposite effect: they shrink the space of art and reduce the agency of artists.”
Yet, as reflected by scholar Aaron Schuster on Szeemann’s contribution to the art world at his death, it is only natural for the curator to have evolved into a curator-artist figure. He notes, “If artists since Marcel Duchamp have affirmed selection and arrangement as legitimate artistic strategies, was it not simply a matter of time before curatorial practice —itself defined by selection and arrangement — would come to be seen as an art that operates on the field of art itself?” Justifiably, curatorial activity can be seen as an artistic activity, similar to art in that it is also an intellectual and creative practice though one that is still informed by a different position, a different toolbox than that of artists. The discourse of curation as a field in itself is a necessary endeavor in comprehending current production and reception within the artistic field, undeniably a part of a larger cultural sphere. Rather than shrouding it in myth, exposing curatorial strategies expands the space of art by placing it in the contemporary context which informs it. This can be done in different ways, not simply limited to written scholarly form but even through an installation, which is perhaps apt given what curators do. It also carries a distinctive method of engagement and the advantage of imparting through looking as well as the ability to reach a wider audience.
Also, the presence of the curator is not necessarily always an overt one as the weight of the curator varies with each exhibition. For some exhibitions, especially solo shows, the curator’s participation may be nearly invisible to others, with the curator playing a hand in discussing with the artist the show’s development, not witnessed by the viewers who see the finished product as the artist’s identity. Other exhibitions may display the curatorial hand more explicitly, through the concept of the exhibition, the creative installation of works or the inclusion of objects which are not necessarily artworks but impart meaning to the context of the exhibition. This exhibition, the curator’s medium, comes through negotiation with the artist, who still controls and can withhold his work if he feels it will suffer at the expense of too much curatorial intrusion. In the best cases, however, curatorial identity enhances artistic identity, extending the understanding of artists’ works within their own oeuvre and expanding it as well in relation to other ideas.
In the current emphasis given to the curator, in becoming in recent decades the curator-artist, there is much still to consider on curatorial identity. Yet, its continuing evolvement becomes not only the subject of remarkable study but one which bears much self-reflection within the activity of actual practice.
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