Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance

Description

To stay relevant, art curators must keep up with the rapid pace of technological innovation as well as the aesthetic tastes of fickle critics and an ever-expanding circle of cultural arbiters. Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance argues that, despite these daily pressures, good curating work also requires more theoretical attention.

In four thematic sections, a distinguished group of contributors consider curation in light of interdisciplinary and emerging practices, examine conceptions of curation as intervention and contestation, and explore curation’s potential to act as a reconsideration of conventional museum spaces. Against the backdrop of cutting-edge developments in electronic art, art/science collaboration, nongallery spaces, and virtual fields, contributors propose new approaches to curating and new ways of fostering critical inquiry. Now in paperback, this volume is an essential read for scholars, curators, and art enthusiasts alike.

Sujets

• Loisirs
• Histoire de la photographie
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinéma
• Cinema
• Film
• ART
• Digital
• Electronic
• History
• General
• Photography
• General officer
• Live Art
• History of art
• Película fotográfica

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841502151
• Langue: English

Extrait

Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance
Edited by Judith Rugg and Mich le Sedgwick
Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance
Edited by Judith Rugg and Mich le Sedgwick
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank all the contributors and acknowledge the financial support of the University College for the Creative Arts; the University of the Arts, London; the University of Plymouth; the University of Surrey and the University of Northumbria.
First Published in the UK in 2007 by Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK
First published in the USA in 2007 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2007 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover Design: John McCabe Copy Editor: Holly Spradling Typesetting: Mac Style, Nafferton, E. Yorkshire
ISBN 978-1-84150-162-8/EISBN 978-1-84150-215-1
Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.
C ONTENTS
Introduction
Judith Rugg
Part 1: Forms of Thinking in Contemporary Curating
The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse
Paul O Neill
Curatorial Strategy as Critical Intervention: The Genesis of Facing East
Liz Wells
No Place like Home: Europa
Sophia Phoca
Part 2: Curating and the Interdisciplinary: Encounter, Context, Experience
Critical Spatial Practice: Curating, Editing, Writing
Jane Rendell
Exhibitions and Their Prerequisites
Chris Dorsett
Part 3: The Role of the Curator: Contestation and Consideration
Curating Doubt
JJ Charlesworth
A Parallel Universe: The Women s Exhibitions at the ICA, 1980, and the UK/Canadian Film and Video Exchange, 1998-2004
Catherine Elwes
Thoughts on Curating
Richard Hylton
Part 4: Emergent Practices: Subverting the Museum
Oscillating the high/low Art Divide: Animation in Museums and Galleries
Suzanne Buchan
Generator: The Value of Software Art
Geoff Cox
Who Makes Site-specific Dance? The Year of the Artist and the Matrix of Curating
Kate Lawrence
The Movement Began with a Scandal
Alun Rowlands
Notes on Contributors
I NTRODUCTION
Judith Rugg
The impetus for this book came from a series of symposia hosted during 2004 and 2005 by the University College for the Creative Arts at Canterbury on issues of curating as a form of critical intervention into ways of comprehending contemporary culture. The contributors to this book and to that debate are artists, academics, writers, theorists and curators whose activities overlap several of these categories, who examine varied perspectives on curating contemporary art and performance and the relationships between them. The book as a collection of chapters, proposes that the concept of curating is a complex field of enquiry. By drawing together writers from different academic backgrounds, Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance initiates new paradigms and critical thinking about this increasingly expanding field.
Part 1: Forms of Thinking in Contemporary Curating proposes a mapping of various issues in approaches to contemporary curating and their implications for the reception of contemporary art. In The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse , Paul O Neill proposes a short history of contemporary curating by examining some of the issues that have emerged in curatorial discourse over the last ten years, including the ritualizing of the experience of art through exhibitions, the rise of biennale culture , the expansion of the artist as a meta-curator and the large-scale curated exhibition as the new autonomous artwork. By articulating the inter-dependent relationship between academic research into the discursive field of contemporary curating and his own curatorial practice, O Neill proposes an inter-related, performative position as a means of critiquing current issues of contemporary art curating.
In Curatorial Strategy as Critical Intervention: The Genesis of Facing East , Liz Wells proposes that curation is essentially a research process, involving investigation, discovery and critical reflection. Through discussion of the curatorial elements of her curated exhibition on contemporary photography from the Baltic, Facing East , she argues that the essential mechanisms and processes of curating parallel those of more established academic models of enquiry, involving the definition and refining of particular research questions. Wells asserts that research underpins the curatorial voice through a process which is composed of a careful definition of the field, rigorous contextualization of the work and consideration of the theatre of the exhibition. Curatorial strategy becomes most effective as critical intervention when it opens exploration and debate, invoking a range of issues and emotions for the viewer.
In No Place Like Home: Europa , Sophia Phoca discusses how concepts such as that of the shifting perception of Europe through its expansion eastwards, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, informed the approach to her co-curated Europa: Film and Video from the Centre of Europe held at Tate Modern in 2004. She also examines issues of cocuratorial practice and authorial ideologies inscribed in this form of curatorial practice and the implications for curating film and video. She explores the significance of curatorial methodology in generating debate about the moving image in an expanding geographic and curatorial context.
Part 2: Curating and the Interdisciplinary: Encounter, Context, Experience looks at concepts of the editor-curator, and the relationships between curating, reception and encounter. In Critical Spatial Practice: Curating, Editing, Writing , Jane Rendell outlines her interests over the past few years in exploring interdisciplinary fields through the curation of texts. Her chapter draws on some of those projects where she has been involved as editor and curator, as well as participant, in order to investigate the role of the editor/curator, artist/architect and critic/theorist. She explores methods of engagement with artworks which she proposes are sites , which can be perceived differently through various tools of investigation. Critical spatial writing, she argues, questions terms of reference that relate the critic to the artwork within the terms of critique .
In Exhibitions and their Prerequisites , Chris Dorsett argues that art-science collaborations have become a familiar concept within funding initiatives such as those of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Welcome Trust. For Dorsett (an artist-curator), such collaborations are forms of interdisciplinary ventures that arise out of the expanded field of arts practice which has shaped the visual arts for several decades. In this chapter, the interdisciplinary nature of the arts/science collaboration is explored via the author s botanical research in a field station at the National Institute for Amazonian Research and its dissemination at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Dorsett explores the possibilities of the reception of such arts/science curations where the context of the reception of the exhibition of work, informed by forest field station, studio and ethno-botanical archive, is in non-art museums.
Part 3: The Role of the Curator: Contestation and Consideration looks critically at the role of the curator of contemporary art. In Curating Doubt , JJ Charlesworth proposes that the relatively recent dialogue around curating has been generated by curators and critics. Curators function practically as well as being reflexive of their own practice and there is a need for the aspect of self-justification that may inflect the discussion as a creative force. Charlesworth considers how art has been bureaucratised over the last ten years, creating a new art managerial class where artist has been displaced by the claims of the curator as the core legitimizing role in the institutions of art. He contemplates a relativism of cultural values, which proposes no special status for any privileged cultural activity but which nevertheless continues in a privileged institutional form.
In A Parallel Universe: The Women s Exhibitions at the ICA, 1980 and the UK/Canadian Film and Video Exchange 1998-2004 , Catherine Elwes discusses how the early years of feminist art saw a struggle against institutional invisibility which prompted three major exhibitions of women s art at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1980. She describes the internal and external problems that arose when a 1970s artists collective attempted to work within the major art institution of the ICA. Elwes compares this event with another curatorial project she was involved with twenty years later: the UK/Canadian Film and Video Exchange, which similarly was concerned to make visible groups of artists neglected by history. These initiatives form the basis for a discussion of the role of the curator deriving from a tradition of collaborative decision-making set down in the 1970s and perpetuated in the contemporary UK/Canadian exchanges. A controversial plea is made by Elwes as both curator and artist, for the burgeoning army of today s curators to follow James Lingwood s advice and understand their position in the food chain . The visibility of art, she argues, should be the goal of curating, not the aggrandizement of what is, in essence, a service trade.
In Thoughts on Curating , Richard Hylton sets out candidly to explore the nature of curating at a time when art in Britain enjoys an unprecedented visibility and popularity. He assesses how changes in public funding coupled with current concerns with conceptual access and inclusion have influenced the notion of critical or interventionalist pr