[curatorial.net] cn discussion

[PaulONeillP at aol.com]

 Thanks for your email Joasia, and for your examples of commissioning in
the SW, I am very grateful.

Please find my responses below to your other comments.

Best wishes
Paul



Joasia:

I wondered about the phenomena of 'curatorial' practice based PhDs -   a
relatively recent phenomena that (much like the independent curatorial
practice itself) appears to have a precedence in artistic field, and
also
appears to be a largely UK-specific model (but I may be wrong on this of
course).

I wondered more generally about 'value' of such curatorial PhDs, about
methodological models they adapt (in particular the grounded theory
model),
and more specifically how they might contribute towards the more general
'curatorial theory'. Having been just completing one myself, I found the
theoretical discourse around curating per se somewhat limited. And
therefore, paraphrasing Victor Burgin, I say 'towards' rather than 'to'
as
such overtly curatorial theory does not seem to exist yet; it has not
been
fully developed although some of its components may already be
identified in
other theoretical fields.

MY RESPONSE:

My PhD submission was really trying to trace the origins of a language
around 'curating as practice' by looking at the development of a
curator-led discourse around curating as a semi-autonomous practice
which already emerged in relation to what Jack Burnham called ‘The
emergence of a “post-formalist aesthetic,”’ when the role of the
exhibition-maker was transformed, in the late 1960s, from an activity
primarily involved with organising exhibitions of discrete artworks, to
a practice that extended its remit to include ‘the curatorial’. What I
mean by 'Curatorial' is along the lines of what Irit Rogoff more
recently called this ‘the possibility of framing those
exhibition-making activities through [a] series of principles and
possibilities.’ Emphasis upon the framing and mediation of art, rather
than its production, not only indicated a response to changes in art
praxis during the late 1960s, but also created a new degree of
visibility for the individual agency involved in the framing of these
practices i.e. the curator.

I argue that this shift was a new mode of practice, or what Raymond
Williams called ‘emergent’ practice, as a cultural activity that
developed with the inherent ‘internal dynamic relations of any actual
process’, as curators attempted to find novel ways of producing
exhibitions, with meanings and values that were ‘substantially
alternative or oppositional’ to the dominant and hegemonic practices of
exhibition-making at the time. Such praxis now operates as a ‘residual’
element of contemporary curatorial discourse in that it ‘relates to
earlier social formations and phases of the cultural process, in which
certain meanings and values were generated’ and there is a contemporary
reaching-back to those meanings and values ‘which still seem to have
significance because they represent areas of human experience,
aspiration, and achievement which dominant culture neglects,
undervalues, opposes, represses, or even cannot recognise.’

My 'curatorial' practice (4 exhibitions) aspect of my research ran
alongside my historical analysis (70 recorded interviews with curators,
which provided the archive for my curatorial research because a
considerable lack of published enquiry within the field) as a way of
showing how discourses around 'the curatorial' developed alongside a
new visibility for certain curators in the 1990s who pushed for the
idea of curating as an indivually-led practice, within curatorial
discussions, conferences, anthologies and curator catalogue statements
in the last twenty years have come with their own internal logic,
whereby there are now certain assumptions which circulate around
dominant discussion premised upon the curator-as-auteur model with the
group show as the primary outcome of any curatorial expression, and
where each exhibition momentr in now seen to be part of a wider
discussion 'within' curatorial discourses. In this sense, the
'curatorial' became known through a rather 'narrow' discursive
formation during this period premised upon the individual figure of the
curator....As you will know, there is no way of finding any Dictionary
definition (Oxford, wiki, spellcheck or otherwise), so we could say
that the term 'curatorial' never mind 'curatorial research' is in
itself a floating signifier within a specific field of discourse, which
is often adapted by other fields and I woud agree with you that
specific research in required within the curatorial field, rather than
considering curatorial research as an all encompasssing term for any
kind of research thyat results in an exhibition or public outcome.




________________________________________________________________________
Email and AIM finally together. You've gotta check out free AOL Mail! -
http://mail.aol.com
   
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.curatorial.net/pipermail/curatorial/attachments/20071021/bcfcb4a5/attachment.html