Gathering Voices: Some Curatorial Perspectives

I was asked to address different models of curatorial practice. One of the things I am interested in is "how the lines blur" between models of practice as a curator, (whether we can call it 'traditional' or otherwise), organizer, historian, artist, or critic.  I'm interested in gathering voices as a model to talk about what we all do.  How we gather and represent voices has implications on how or if those voices are heard.  Clearly, how we frame those voices is important. This framing includes the curatorial model, the context, i.e., institutions of all kinds, our assumptions, and the language we use. We are all in some position of authority. How and if we acknowledge our positions becomes crucial.

I could have read the opening paragraphs of a number of press releases which are fairly descriptive in terms of how institutions present themselves, how they frame exhibitions, what language they use, and who they think their audience is.  I am sure you can all imagine the descriptive phrases without my reading them.  Press can be a good indicator for the study of representation.

There is an article that I give my first year students each year which was written by Thomas McEvilley and published a number of years ago in Artforum called “In The Manner of Addressing Clouds or 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”. It lays out 13 ways of deriving content from a work of art such as formal aspects, (scale, color, medium, etc.), historical context, knowledge of the artist who makes the work, friends and personal info, etc.  For instance, you can't quite look at Carl Andre's sculptures anymore without knowing that he supposedly pushed his wife out the window. It really makes a difference in terms of how you look at work. The context of that work has now changed. There are aspects which the article does not list which my class discusses such as gender, race, sexual preference, and he doesn't talk at all about content from a curatorial context specifically.  One of the things I ask my students, for instance, is why they make paintings on a rectangle. It's really shocking to them because they have rarely considered the automatic-ness in choosing certain ways of making art.    

I was thinking last night about this article and began to look at the correlation between curatorial practice and the different ways that content is derived in terms of curatorial practice. There are so many decisions and factors that determine how our work as curators and organizers gets read.  Certainly the institutions we work in and who we represent is a factor and that can lend content to our exhibitions.    

Assumptions about what you say as a curator can be based on the history of the institution.  I was talking to someone yesterday and they asked me particularly about a particular curator. They were making assumptions about the institution and him as a curator.  A lot of speculating, of course. I went on to explain some of the things that this curator had done before and what he was known for in the States. And all of the sudden, they were thinking about watching to see what happens, instead of assuming that things would be status quo. Those sorts of elements are also important in terms of how we're seen by our own histories as curators as well.  Often, it’s difficult to control the content of our work, but if we don’t think about it, it’s very problematic.   

Who is included, or more than likely who is not included in exhibitions, signs of the institution and its relationship to the community where the institution is located or “non-institutional projects” and attempts to present ourselves outside the institutional context are all indicators of our projected content.  I’m not sure there is any such thing as a non-institution, but I think it’s certainly debatable.  In addition, our gender, race, and age as curators, our own histories, the successes and mistakes we make, how we position ourselves in a historical context, or how accessible we are, are all part of the curatorial model we use and has implications on how the project maybe received. Are the voices we have gathered heard?  Or repressed in the name of our own ideas?

I want to present some models to look at. Some of them are my own, developed for various reasons, in which I will attempt to explain. Others, are models that are out there in the world and you may or may not have used them, or have any use for them. I’ve spent a lot of time presenting various models to artists and talking about self-generating projects.  Questions of access always come up, especially for those artists who don’t quite fit into the model the institutions are looking for. Over the years I have created something called “The Alternatives List” which lists over a hundred options for artists, ways of working or presenting that have been tried by either curators or artists. There is some overlap in terms of how artists worry about the presentation of their own work and how organizers or curators present work.  Both are thinking of how the work will be read, the artists within the curator’s ideas, and the curator who is often using the artists work to present ideas.  There’s been a lot of discussion about the curator as artist, both pro and con.

My own work as an artist has a lot to do with how I look at curatorial practice, particularly my own. For many observers my own work blurs the distinction between how I work as an artist and how I gather voices together around a certain issue or set of ideas. In the late seventies I was working in slide form, not reproductions of other work but creating work in slide form, sometimes with audio, sometimes not. I would rear-screen project them in store front windows without their being validated as art by any source or institution. None of the teachers I had at the time could understand anything about what I was doing what-so-ever. In the eighties I found a number of other artists working in slide form and decided that instead of just projecting my own work, that I would gather a group of artists’ projects together. Not only did I ask a number of artists who were already working in slide form but I asked a number of artists who were interested in the nature of site, understood the relationship of their work to a particular place, and essentially challenged them to make work in this way.  

This project called “Projections In Public” has been presented in storefront windows throughout the States and Canada, and exchanges are underway for France, Britain and Australia. I think that the nature of putting a group of voices together was beneficial because I was interested in my work having a dialogue with other artists. The first time I got funding for this project though, I ran into a snag. The institution decided that since I was the one who gathered the voices I could no longer participate in the project, and automatically I was defined and perceived as what we call “the curator”.  In order for me to be able to do the project and receive the funding, I had to take my work out of the project, even though that was the catalyst for how the project started in the first place.  The way it was explained to me and has been explained to me many times since, is that there is some sort of notion that if the curator includes his or her work it has something to do with ego. I find that interesting because I think that if I was interested in ego as an artist I would do a solo show and do the work myself, not add a bunch of artists to the project. The challenge of those rigid definitions and the idea of always being put into particular slots has continued to generate thoughts about what my position is in relationship to gathering voices as a way of defining my curatorial position.

The projection project usually takes place in a site which is not an art site, so in San Diego I projected in an architect's office; an architect’s office by day and an exhibition space at night. In Los Angeles, the site was a flower market by day and an exhibition site at night. It has projected through the theater doors on 42nd street in New York at Intar Multicultural Gallery, and in a furniture store in Grand Rapids Michigan, etc. In each project, I've always included local artists wherever the project has taken place, as well as more nationally known or internationally known artists. One of the reasons I have continued this exhibition is you can jump on the plane with it in your briefcase, which means very low shipping costs.  It also includes up to 30 artists at a time, so it can present a lot of voices for a very reasonable cost.

I did a stint at a nonprofit artist run organization in San Diego where I was the Director of Exhibitions and Programming. I found that all the money and funding went to a very small area in the city.  Everything went downtown or to various arts institutions and there were really no art presentations happening outside of that area. I decided to secure some money and commission projects in three different neighborhoods which traditionally had absolutely no arts funding or arts spaces.  Well, one of those neighborhoods had a museum, but never really showed local artists.  I asked an artist from each of those diverse neighborhoods to create a project that would include a performance, take place in a public site somewhere in that neighborhood, would be a collaboration with other artists within that neighborhood, and would include a projection of some kind. This took place in three different neighborhoods and the intention was for the audience to travel from site to site in places they had never been in that city.  For instance, in Southeast San Diego, which is predominantly Afro-American, there was a film and a performance in front of the Taco Bell stand in which people in the community interacted.  We were singing gospel songs out on the street at the end of this performance!  So I'm interested in how institutions can depart from what they normally do and present projects in other ways.

As part of my own work as an artist I sometimes secure an exhibition somewhere and then ask 20 artists to present a component of that show.  Sometimes curators have a hard time with this.  I understand why on one level, but I think about being able to open things up in some way and having these rigid categories challenged,  about what's allowed and what's not as an artist is important.  

I’ve done a number of installations where I transformed the gallery into a public space.  I created a corporate boardroom, a lawyer’s office and a tourist office within the exhibition space. The lawyer's office was created to fight for the reauthorization of N.E.A, and was called “Atkinson & Associates, ARTorneys at Work”. I asked 35 artists to design postcards that would be sent to all the congressional districts, congress persons, and senators who were on the reauthorization committee. It was a way of including other voices about what was being said. It wasn't just me talking about this particular issue; I added lots of other artists and in the process viewers sent over 10,000 postcards, so all these artist projects were piled on these congress persons' desks.  In the tourist office, which critiques the language of discovery and its relationship to tourism, I asked artists to design postcards and maps that remap their own desires.  This is an ongoing project.  This may seen simple, but the distinctions become blurred when you have to check a box on the grant application, “solo” or “group”.  Or when an institution misrepresents your work to their own advantage.   

I have one more example in terms of how I as an individual artist have included people in my own work. There is a public art project which is scheduled to open December 1, 1993. It’s titled “For the Time Being” and consists of 20 parking meters which I’ve wired for sound.  I've commissioned 20 artists and writers to write audio text projects for the meters. The writers are either HIV positive or have AIDS, or have asked their friends and family to write a text for the project, which is then recorded on tape. When the viewer feeds the meter with a quarter, the tape plays, and when the meter runs out the tape is silent. These meters are being placed in 20 locations throughout the city, in such public sites as museums, artist-run centers, city halls (both in West Hollywood and Los Angeles), community centers, a book store, AIDS centers, building lobbies, anywhere that's a public space where there's a lot of foot traffic. The project is my design, and for me, asking others to participate is a way for these voices to be heard in a different context (or actually any context). I don't think that many of those voices are heard very much at all outside of very specific places or publications. The money collected for this project is going towards a fund being started by Side Street Projects, an artists’ run nonprofit which I co-direct, to support artists with AIDS in the fabrication of their work. So it's a very circular project. What I like about this project is that these meters can change sites throughout the city, be an ongoing project, and more artists can be commissioned.  The tapes rotate from place to place.  So, am I the artist?  The curator? The organizer?  All three?

I have been collecting ways that different curators practice. I'll present some of them here, not necessarily as something better or worse than anything else, but just to look at them.  I’m sure that everybody here can add to them and talk about their own experiences in terms of how you choose a model for presenting work.

I think that one of the reasons many people have developed new ways of curating has a lot to do with access in terms of artists having access to institutions, or whether anybody will talk to them from the institutions.   Who curators visit when they travel to other cities to look at work are usually the same institutions. They all go to the big museums and galleries and ask who's doing work in town.  They might go to the artist-run centers but what I think happens is it usually ends up being the same recurring list of artists that get looked at.

One of the curatorial models can be described as the shopping curator, in which the curator goes to the studio, has an idea of what they want to do and what to say, and chooses the work accordingly.  (I’ll take one of those and two of those and...). I think there are both good and bad aspects about this.

Another model would be that the curator creates the content and the context of the exhibition based on the different sensibilities of the artists whose work they become familiar with, or by certain issues “in the air.”  But instead of choosing specific works the curator asks the artists to create work or choose their own work specifically for the exhibition. I think this is more risky. I think it also changes the position of the voice and the framing of the exhibition. We can argue about that.  I myself find that the exhibitions I’ve worked on with this model are inherently more interesting and the work is rarely pushed by a non-artist to fit the context of the show.  Artists are often a great judge as to how their ongoing work fits into the content of a show when they construct or choose the work accordingly.  For those curators who demand to have the last word, they can always see those choices before they arrive in the exhibition space.  But it’s less about shopping and more about context.  The artist’s voice is usually more apparent in the exhibition.

Armando Rascon created what he calls “The Multicultural Reading Room.”  He asked 30 artists from all over the States to present 2 or 3 books that had made a difference in their lives in terms of how they thought about multiculturalism and what influenced how issues were formed for them. The exhibition traveled to a number of different sites and then was donated to a library as part of their permanent collection. It automatically created a situation in the library where the acquisition pushed past its book collection and expanded the boundaries of what the librarian might have chosen.  Another example of creating a situation where more than one voice speaks and where something quite wonderful can happen.

Other exhibitions are created when a curator chooses a number of artists who choose another artist to be part of an exhibition. It expands the pool of artists but I often find this is very arbitrary experience.  I think there are many possibilities for going past a number of people that one knows.  This model might work best for studio visits.

An artist invites his/her friends to participate in a show he/she curates.  This is usually not very interesting. It's very arbitrary.

There's the free-for-all where everybody hangs works, which is the model for mail art, fax art shows, etc.  “Quality” is always an issue with these projects, and most professional artists don’t participate in these kinds of projects.

There's a space in San Francisco called the Galleria de la Raza.  They were very frustrated with the fact that the projects being proposed for their space were not very interesting. Shows leaped from one fanatic idea to another.   So they sat down as a committee and created a whole year of ideas they wanted to address and things they wanted to accomplish for the year.  But instead of curating within their own institution, they opened it up for proposals from the field, with the guidelines determining the content of the submissions. What's happening is that they are getting a lot of different solutions and ways of looking at the issues they are interested in.  The mission of their programming remains consistent, but the way this mission is accomplished has been opened up to some great ideas they never would have thought of themselves, and the issues that are important for them to address as a space are being addressed.  There are exhibitions in which the work is changed or altered by the audience.  Perhaps the viewer is asked to participate by adding or altering an element to the work, or by moving parts around the space.  So who’s the artist?

Another model is the neighborhood committee or project. There are some interesting debates going on in Los Angeles in which a community wants to do a mural. It's being blocked in every way possible by the powers that be within the city. They are really struggling with the idea that a community or neighborhood can actually choose what they want in their neighborhood. So there is this interesting dilemma that's going on between who has the power to actually block an artwork supported by the very people who live there, which is interesting to me.  It’s a reversal of the Richard Serra phenomenon.  The mural happens to chronicle the history of the Black Panthers.

There is a current exhibition going on at Exit Art in New York and it's called “How Do You Play the Game.” They have invited five highfalutin' curators in New York to create an exhibition within that site.  It’s a collaborative, conceptual exhibition project which will investigate the curatorial process and reveal how curators’ choices reflect their aesthetic and critical values.  The show is conceived of as a game in which the participants, five curators of contemporary art, will each take turns selecting and installing work of art chosen in response to the other curator’s selections.  In the succeeding weeks, the five curators will take turns independently choosing and installing new works.  It changes and expands each week reflecting and reinforcing curatorial dialogue.  This is the plan anyway.  It will be interesting to see the results.  This model foregrounds curatorial practice within the exhibition.

In Baltimore, a project was created where artists were hooked up with business owners/workers who were non-artists.  They were people who had never worked with artists before and they each worked on a collaborative page for a publication. They were interested in alleviating the situation where the artists are separate from everybody else. They presented these collaborations in a publication or newsletter which then was distributed throughout the city.  So it's very interesting that, for instance, someone who ran a shoe store collaborated with an artist and presented a page work. I think that catalogues as exhibition sites can be very interesting.  Most catalogues I see have a particular format and those formats could be pushed in a different direction to have different functions than the traditional documentary style presentation of work.   Perhaps it can function as an artwork in itself, or an exhibition in print.  It can circulate with different intentions than its traditional one.

Often, I try to create publications with exhibitions in which the artists in the exhibitions have control over their own pages.  Sometimes the catalogs have other functions and have a target audience outside the art scene. For instance, for a recent project called “Just Take This: woman/pain/medical histories,” all the artists did a page for a publication.  It included information about hotlines, phone numbers, health groups, AIDS information, etc.  This was distributed to women's health centers throughout all of Los Angeles.   When the project traveled to San Francisco, we did the same thing with local information.  It was a way of bridging this element between artists and how the work is presented.  People from those health centers and women's centers were coming into the gallery to see the work.

Exhibitions don’t always need to take place in a particular site.  It might be a publication stuffed into your local newspaper, or on the Internet.  Alternative sites for art are always good, particularly ones that take site into consideration.  Exhibitions have taken place in really great odd places.  Artists have exhibited their work in shopping carts where advertisements are usually located.  In  parking spaces outside world art fairs, in semitrucks, rented sites at flee markets for installations, storage spaces in storage buildings, created performances in model homes, and generally developed some really great locations for the unexpected.  One artist altered all the stop signs in a neighborhood and held a reception out of the trunk of his car.  Opened the trunk hood, and there was the wine and cheese.

It’s good to challenge the conventions of display.  Like asking a student why they paint on a rectangle.

One last example. There's a group of six artists in Los Angeles, including myself, who have created an exhibition in which is titled “The Curators.”  All the artists are the curators of the exhibition, so there's no division, there's no one curator. Those six artists are the curators, the writers of the catalogue and the artists in the exhibition.  Each artist’s work will address a curatorial model or issue in some way.  It's a way of collapsing and exploring this notion between defining who is speaking under what definition.

I don’t know how helpful this all is, but it seems to me that the most important factor is how we frame the work we do or how we are framed by things out of our control.  Our voices as curators and the voices of the artists we gather are important elements to our culture.  Perhaps by being aware of our decisions and the language we use the way our work is perceived will come closer to our intentions.   

This transcript is excerpted from Get Your Sh*t Together, an artist's professional development series produced by Side Street Projects, Los Angeles.  Visit their web site to order the complete series on CD-ROM.