‘Collective Curating’
I took a few books out at the University Library on Curating, to see if I could get some inspiration.
One of which was ‘Collective Curating’:
Whilst reading this book I highlighted some of the sentences and paragraphs that stood out to me;
‘General idea declared that working in a group had freed them from the tyranny of the individual genius’
This stood out because I agree that sometimes if you discuss something in a group, you can achieve more with everyones ideas bouncing around, therefore you end up creating something so much stronger.
But I also think it could go the other way if you don’t work together well.
‘It might be useful to make a distinction between collective curating as the shared responsibility of selecting, confronting and putting into a dialogue a series of art works and curational visions, and setting up a collaborative endeavour of shared authorship uttered as a single voice’
With this one I took from it that curation id all about a group of people coming together and acting as a single unit.
So basically it’s all about team work and working together!
‘We disagreed, when necessary, and agreed, whenever possible. we understood that agreements and disagreements did not cancel each other out in a zero, sum game, but spiralled instead to new levels of connectedness’
So basically we’re not going all agree at everything, but we need to understand that it’s normal and maybe because of that, some of the decisions will turn out better and actually bring us closer?
‘In the course of being each others shadows, we became each others databases, leaning on each others memories, multiplying and amplifying and anchoring the things we could imagine by sharing our dreams, speculations and curiosities’
This just made me think that, again, we need to work as a team, and that if someone is forgetting something is all our jobs to support them. Not to leave one person to do everything but to be a part of the bigger thing.
‘More and more, the subject of an exhibition tends not to be the display of artworks but the exhibition of the exhibition as a work of art’
So it’s not necessarily the art pieces that people are going to be looking at, it’s the actual show as whole.
How it’s been executed and the decisions we have made!
It’s important to create a show that shows the art work to it’s full potential.
‘Precarious actions highly depend on individuals’
I thought about this sentence for a while because I know that I, personally, am a bit of a control freak.
If theres anything thats precarious, or fragile, I would want to take care of that myself, because there are individuals in the group that wouldn’t take as much care as me.
So I guess this would go in with working as a team. I think everybody needs to take this into account!
‘There is a well known gap between theory and practice in curational undertakings, however this gap is not evident when a curator is involved in his or her everyday activities.
A curator speaks and deals with artists, views artworks and reflects on them, takes part in the publication of texts by artists, writes, comments on and keeps abreast of critical theory, organises exhibitions, helps raise money, assesses artworks, comes up with projects and enters into dialogue with institutions, the media and exhibition visitors…’
This Paragraph is what made me realise how much work you do as a curator, and what it takes from your everyday life.
In a weird way it made me envious! The more I do of this module the more I want to do more of it.
I’d like the chance to curate a show from beginning to end with my own ideas in mind and no rules, so to speak.
It’s something I’ve thought about before, but this module has helped clarify that!
ARTlife. 