Curating People: Post-Show Paraphrase

My own notes are my personal interpretations of points raised by our speakers, but here is an attempt to share a few paraphrases of some of the things that made me do some extra scribbling.  Others should feel free to add phrases and paraphrases that they remember—or correct mine.

Angela Mattox: how can different organizations make use of each others’ resources to support an artist?…there is an art to the practical…

Erin Doughton: representing the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art not of contemporary art…When we talk about ‘community,’ I mean “us” as part of that community.  Community isn’t a codeword for something else… our Time-Based Arts festival abbreviates to TBA…our theatre tech crew all came from working on ships.

Betti-Sue Hertz: the stage and the exhibit hall both all in crisis…the use of the curtain in the visual art exhibition as a way to think about …my partners are international, and curators often function as the broker between our local audience and a wider international conversation

David Henry: the Walker was heaven… Performance was a central part of the city plan to widen the reach of the ICA in Boston…never under-estimate the power of the registrar…artists are more fun to work with than agents…we could also have another conversation about what kind of performance work visual art curators are drawn to and what kind of performance work performance curators are drawn to…

Kristan Kennedy: my first experience with PICA was when i protested the organization…subverting process is central to what the institution is…look around and you’ll realize that Brody Condon is over there reading Brecht…against the idea of a curator as an arbiter of taste

Trinh Minh-ha: l’autre marche translates as an other walk and the other is walking…what it means to require the walker in a museum to stop, linger, and alter the usual pattern for moving in a museum

Connie Lewallen: there used to be 15 to 17 alternative sites devoted to performance work in San Francisco…[FABULOUS SLIDES]…several curators really took an interest in performance [FABULOUS SLIDES]…a lot of the great performance work of the seventies was supported by B.A.M…[FABULOUS SLIDES]…there was much innovative work of course that happened in San Francisco with no support…[FABULOUS SLIDES]…

Susan Miller: …some artists I like…artists whose practice developed from working in the San Francisco scene…New Langton was entirely an artist-run, artist-curated space

Tony Labat: …some said that this was a time when artists stopped doing what they were good at doing…remember Paul McCarthy who said that art experiments are created in San Francisco, packaged in L.A., and sold in New York…we thought that starting a non-profit was going to mean having to do a bunch of things that we didn’t feel like doing, so we funded the work by selling beer at the events…we drank alot of beer

Stephen Tourell: Tom Marioni ran the Museum of Conceptual Art from 1970 to 1984; I consider that a success…believe it or not, the title Performance Art Institute had never been registered before October 2009…the O-Visa is the way to expand international residencies for artists in San Francisco

Lucinda Childs: Sol LeWitt did not want to create a background for dancers—why would that be an interesting thing to do, he said—so we agreed that dancers would function as “the decor” for the work…so to speak…an example of a problem that I give my students in studio? OK, “do a three-count phrase followed by a four-count phrase followed by a five-count phrase…”

Post-Show Reflection: Curating People

It is hard to believe that it has been a week since the Curating People conference. Like most participants, I left our day of reflection to return to the mayhem of this week’s obligations, and it has been hard to come up for air.

Since I am writing during a moment that can only be described as “stolen,” I will not try to summarize the pages and pages of notes that I took during all of the thoughtful and energetic sessions. Instead, I will very quickly put out some clustered thinking around ideas and hopes that I heard expressed in the room. I would welcome any feedback, responses, revisions, or expansions on any of the below. So in no particular order, not in complete sentences, no footnotes (hard for an academic), let me offer the following:

1) How to un-silo communities of arts and culture: Milk Bar-like occasions for artists to casually and convivially curate work for each other. Artpractical and ARC “Picks” that run the gamut of arts programming. Co-taught courses that require students, artists, and faculty to engage more deeply, less superficially in the skills and histories of other forms. Sustain a national and international network of artists and organizers addressing similar issues and silos in their regions of the world. Can international programming from abroad in fact facilitate cross-arts engagement, especially when a shared area studies focus provides the context for connection?

2) Economies that support hybrid art work: individual philanthropy? state and federal funding? arts foundation funding? funding from non-artistic sectors? revenue from tickets? from rentals? from selling beer? How does mixed-media address, dodge, and deploy this mixed economy? Amid the distress about a “financial crisis” that makes it hard to argue for the arts, what opportunities do we have to join other discourses that are trying to remind us of values other than the economic?

3) More writers and writing venues: As art organizers and curators lamented the absence of “the press” in contextualizing their work, we ended up confronting the state of criticism as a profession and in the age of the blogosphere. In particular, some noted that the dearth of writers able to address the broad landscape of performance and relational art. We also noted that the act of critical writing is less often integrated into the job description of the performance producer than it is in the job description of the visual arts curator. While I share frustration around these issues, my hope is that academic institutions have a role to play here, both as a venue for educating art writers and in general as a venue that is supposed to be devoted to sustaining public dialogue.

4) Future research: Some of us might be specifically interested in plotting collaborative research projects from here forward. 1) Bay Area Arts Ecologies: While there has been wonderful work on artists, groups, and movements, it seems that there is much more historicization of experimental arts in the Bay Area’s recent past. Some have begun interviews, archives, documentation, and new critical writing on this topic. How can we mobilize extant efforts and begin new ones that plot this diverse history? 2) Cross-Arts Curating Handbooks/Collections: I wondered about a sustained effort to gather interviews, transcribed roundtables, strategic conversations between artists and their curators/producers. Would such real-world stories that are both conceptual and pragmatic be of service to arts administrators, artists, curators, students, funders?  

5) Future spaces for reflection: Participants talked about not having time in the midst of their work to reflect on its significance or to think about broader pictures. Do we need an arts administrators’ retreat?  a curators’ colony?  experiences akin to those Minh-ha described to some of us, where people are gathered from multiple sectors to experience and make art in an unusual space? More immediately, we at ARC want to continue to create more spaces of reflection that produce helpful conversations and new work for all involved. We are thinking that the next one will be more squarely focused on Curating the Social, with all that means for arts education, social practice, community engagement, and audience interaction. Any input on what you would like to see from what such a gathering? or ideas about what kinds of ongoing gatherings we should join rather than try to reinvent ourselves?

Curating People: Lisa Wymore

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium “Curating People” on April 28 and 29, 2011. Participants have been invited to post some brief thoughts on the topic in advance of the event. This guest posting is by Lisa Wymore, Assistant Professor of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies at UC Berkeley and Co-Director of Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts.

                   

Confessions of an experimental artist who has also become an academic and a dance/performance educator and mentor

Like many who are part of this symposium, I wear multiple hats in one day. I am both an administrator of a dance program within a university and an artist who manages, runs, and creates for my own dance company. My choice to make artistic work within an academic institution has provided me with distinct types of support and opportunity. I can make work with students and improve upon my own artistic process.  I can educate about dance and deepen my understanding of dance practice and pedagogy. I can study performance/dance theory and remain a practice-based, sensate, and process-oriented artist who is inspired by critical inquiry. I can have a research practice involving the creation of an inter-media laband make dances that are informed by this research practice and the access I have to a lab on a regular basis. It is a complicated paradigm that I have created, but one that is endlessly stimulating, demanding, and ultimately rewarding.

 In reading the blog postings I felt connected to many of the comments, but one comment by Susan Miller really stood out: “Production is always a collaborative process.” This is an important statement on many levels. Behind the artist, or with the artist, are many collaborators who are often not recognized as such. The nature of these collaborations influences how the work is made, supported, and ultimately received. My academic work includes improving collaborative/production-based processes so that new models for making artistic work (not always in the theater and not always made in the “traditional” theater-based mode) are witnessed and experienced by students, and one can hope, carried into the “real” world. Personally, I carry what I have learned from my academic art making practice into my non-academic art making practice. Often the two worlds are mutually supportive and sometimes they are not. This vacillating and interconnected place where my multiple practices interact, collide, mingle, fuse, etc. is where I am interested in investigating and knowing more about.

Curating People: Erin Boberg Doughton

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium “Curating People” on April 28 and 29, 2011. Participants have been invited to post some brief thoughts on the topic in advance of the event. This guest posting is by Erin Boberg Doughton, Performing Arts Program Director at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA).

                                          

I came to PICA through a performance background in theatre, dance and music. Starting on the ground floor of a new organization I was part of a small team working with artists in both visual art and performance. With each project I learned a new set of skills, generally related to connecting artists with the human and/or physical resources they needed to make their work happen, teaming them with designers, technicians and thinkers in our community as well as spaces, materials, and tools. As PICA does not maintain a permanent theatre or gallery, we are fairly flexible with labels and structure. As my role at PICA has changed over the past 15 years I have worked with a series of Artistic Directors and have been sometimes more and sometimes less involved with the curatorial work of researching and inviting artists and putting their work in context with each other and for a public. Curating in that sense is a small fraction of what I do. I spend most of my time on project management, coordinating or producing, although I hesitate to use any of those words as they sound so commercial. The word “presenting” falls short to me because it feels focused on the moment that the curtain opens and the work is revealed – voila! Although I have been the person standing in front of that curtain many times, I feel more at home behind it. I think about the Latin root of curate “to care” as a deep part of what I do and in that case (when I am really living up to my own ideals in my job), it feels right. I feel what I contribute is in service not only to each individual artist but to moving our cultural history forward in small increments that will add up to something meaningful over time. Although I have no formal training as an administrator or curator, (which is typical among my colleagues in the performance field) I have access to a great network of artists, peers and mentors that could be defined as a “learning community.” I spend more time talking with artists and colleagues both formally and informally than writing or cataloging. Critical writing and documentation are areas I would like to expand for myself, for my organization and for the performance field in general. I think the current definitions of presenter/curator/performance/visual, as fluid as they are, don’t really do justice to the complexity of our field and I am interested in helping to find the right language to describe what we do for ourselves and for the public. Like my colleague Kristan I am not so interested in the “vs.” or valuing one over the other, but in defining what each of us do well so that we have the largest possible set of skills and resources available to serve artists as their forms and needs change.

Curating People: Kristan Kennedy

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium “Curating People” on April 28 and 29, 2011. Participants have been invited to post some brief thoughts on the topic in advance of the event. This guest posting is by Kristan Kennedy, Visual Arts Curator at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.

                                    

Confessions of an Artist/Artist-Curator/Curator of Artists

I do not come to this symposium with a pedigree.  Somehow through hard work and the investigation of ideas, I have gotten to where I am today.  I am an artist who also calls herself a curator. I sit within an institution working on behalf of artists. I also attempt to teach, to write, to arrange objects and humans  -  in rooms and in theaters and in storefronts and on the street. In my role at PICA I have often said yes. I have rarely had to say no. This feels like a privilege. I want to pass that along to the artists I work with. I want them to feel free to make what they want how they want where they want.

I often have difficult conversations with the community of artists and others that surround me about art and money, and art and meaning, and art and value, and art and community. I use words like “hybrid” and “discursive” and “dialogue” and “ practice” and “ intention”. I often talk about “de-historization” the “current moment” and “ collapsing forms”. I love to put the word “post” in front of everything. I like to think we are post- everything. Sometimes those words sounds right, and sometimes it sounds like the shifty language of the art world and therefore, flawed and contradictory and awful. The not so secret, secret is we are all still looking for the words to describe the now.

Part of the now is the debate over presenting vs. curating, object vs. action, performance vs. performing, plastic vs. live, social practice vs. studio practice. For the most part I like to take the vs. out of the conversation all-together. However, institutional mandates, missions, funding, venue and ego often make that impossible. And as open as I would like to pretend to be, I like sides.

Since this is about confession… I confess that I do not have any of it figured out. I also confess that I hope I never do, and that I always have the luxury of trying to.

I will conclude with this example of me fighting against myself. In an email to my colleagues on the upcoming panel, I said the following…It is also a confession of sorts.

“I do not know the thinking behind the Symposium name “Curating People”. I always imagined it to be a play on words- to get at- the difference between curating people (performances made by people) and curating objects. This brings up similar issues that David Henry talks about so eloquently in his statement. In my world of Visual Art “presenting” there is often a disconnect between the art and the human who made it, especially if we are talking about collecting institutions. Often the human is an afterthought. However, in my life at PICA, regardless of form, we are curating people… not objects. Even the artists who are presenting sculpture with no crossover into other forms no “LIVE” element are still in the room. They are a part of the equation for me, always. 

I too am not sure about the title of the panel “When Presenters Become Curators, When  Curators Become Presenters” mostly because the word “presenter” seems so corporate  and removed from the work we do, although I hear it all the time and know it does not always have those connotations, it still makes me bristle. It is the same reaction I have to putting an “s” after Art - Arts. It is the same way I feel about the distinction between performance art and performing art(s). From my experience it is more the structure and rigidity of the organization and the perceived systems of support.(Collectors vs. Ticket Buying audience. Gallery vs. Theater. ) and of course the curatorial ego that prevent hybrid works from truly succeeding. (well then there is my previous statement, that just because something takes place in the venue of one or another form does not make it hybrid, or as well all know, “good” - this brings up questions of aesthetics and relevance- and craft- virtuosity…) At the same time the obsession with talking about all of the genres collapsing (which may be true in part) does not leave room for things to remain autonomous and connected to a unique history all of it’s own.

I know that was a discursive ramble. I am hoping that it will start to be clear in the moment. The best panel conversations are ones that are allowed to follow their most exciting course, perhaps that is why we should think of a super vague title- then whatever we wind up blabbing about will fit the container.”

The end.

Curating People: Michele Rabkin

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium “Curating People” on April 28 and 29, 2011. Participants have been invited to post some brief thoughts on the topic in advance of the event. This guest posting is by Michele Rabkin, Associate Director of the Arts Research Center.

                                        

Why I want to be in on this conversation…I am excited to be involved in organizing the “Curating People” symposium because it allows me to re-visit issues that I explored when I was a practicing artist—or to be more accurate, a student artist. 

I first encountered the siren song of performance art in the mid-1980s at San Francisco State, and more specifically at its Center for Experimental and Interdisciplinary Art, where Ellen Zweig, Christine Tamblyn, and Lynn Hershman were teaching.  CEIA was not specifically a performance art program—it was essentially a “misfits” program, home to students whose interests did not fit neatly into the other, more established departments at that time (I myself was a refugee from a “professional theater training program” back East).  CEIA students made video art installations, did persona projects, performed in the back of pick-up trucks.  One of my own projects was a video-enhanced gallery installation I occupied for hours at a time, performing in silent slow-motion.  “Curating People” and its focus on live performers in art galleries awakens memories of my  undergraduate days.

Both at SF State and later in Chicago, I also created works for ensembles of performers (and video screens) that were presented under the rubric of dance. I was inspired by the Judson Dance Theater’s work with pedestrian movement, and by artists who blended dance and spoken word, like Joe Goode. When I decided to go to graduate school, it was unclear to me where I fit in. I looked at programs in dance, in theater, in performance studies—and  ended up pursuing a MFA in Visual Arts at UC San Diego (I seem to recall my application essay focused on the idea of an inter-artistic “pidgin” language). The faculty included Allan Kaprow, Eleanor Antin, and David Antin—genre-defying figures I had studied and been inspired by as an undergraduate. Once again, one of my projects involved occupying a gallery—this time interacting directly with visitors one at a time, rather than performing silently. I also continued to make more theatrical, text- and movement-based works for myself and others to perform (much to the dismay of Professor Kaprow, may he rest in peace).

I long ago traded in my “aspiring artist” hat for that of an arts administrator. My meandering studies in the arts (theater, dance, performance, film, a little art history) turned out to be good preparation for working in an interdisciplinary arts organization. Whether organizing an artist’s residency, a symposium, or a graduate fellowship program, I draw on my past experiences to understand how I can best support the artists and arts scholars with whom I’m working.

During the “Curating People” conversations, I look forward to hearing how the pioneers with whom I studied have or have not influenced current artistic and curatorial practices, and how the challenges and rewards of “hybrid” art-making have evolved since my own brief forays into that world.

Curating People: Leigh Markopoulos

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium “Curating People” on April 28 and 29, 2011. Participants have been invited to post some brief thoughts on the topic in advance of the event. This guest posting is by Leigh Markopoulos, Chair, Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice, California College of the Arts.

                                    

I joined the Hayward Gallery’s exhibition department in 1991, becoming one of a staff of around 70 in the visual arts arm of London’s multi-disciplinary South Bank Center (SBC). At the time there was a very clear-cut distinction between our remit and that of the SBC’s other cultural, mainly music, programs. This distinction was based not solely on different media, but on the assumption that art audiences would never equal concert goers in their numbers, or paying power, and that the Hayward Gallery’s role consequently might not be as vital or valuable. The blockbuster exhibitions of the 90s, from Toulouse-Lautrec to Magritte put paid to this theory, but to this day the Hayward continues to pose conceptual problems for the SBC’s management. The Gallery’s recent exhibitions seem to be following center-wide directives to create “experiences” for audiences, installations that entertain across ages, and appeal especially to the young.  In 2010 the exhibitionMove: Choreographing You sought to trace the trajectory of artworks that propel viewers through spaces, from Nauman’s Green Light Corridor to Tania Bruguera’s installation, “Untitled” (2002), in which participants are alternately plunged into mute darkness and noisy spotlights. As one critic said, usually exhibitions have doubters asking, “is it art?” here they were also asking, “but is it dance?”

At least there’s no question that people are indispensable to exhibition making. From technicians and installers to artists and graphic designers. Occasionally they are indispensable to works, for example the silver-lame-bikini-clad dancer animating Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (Go-Go Dancing Platform). And then there are those works which are or were people, or performance, and which consequently may require completely different frameworks for (re)presentation: Marina Abramovic’s “Rhythm 10,” in which the artist jabbed knives at the splayed fingers of her hand. Andy Warhol’s Invisible Sculpture of 1985, created in 1985 by Warhol posing momentarily on a pedestal at the New York nightclub Area, leaving behind a wall label that identified the empty pedestal. Tino Seghal’s “staged situations” which are performed by “interpreters” and activated by viewers, for example This Progress, in which one is led through the space by a progression of increasingly aged (from a child to an elderly person) docents.

Issues both practical and conceptual related to the presentation, documentation and reception of performance are worked through as part of the curriculum of the graduate program in Curatorial Practice at CCA. They are especially relevant again now with the resurgence not only of performance, but also the emergence of performing as part of the repertoire of contemporary interdisciplinary artist. I’m not sure if they call for a new kind of curator, given that curating can most broadly be understood as “exhibition organizing,” but they certainly have galvanized the discussion around exhibition practice and formats and have re-energized thinking around the definition of the parameters of the visual arts and their place in the broader spectrum of culture.