Pause/Play: Curating as Living/Aesthetic Analysis (original) (raw)

Curating and the Educational Turn

An anthology of new writing that argues for acknowledgment of an educational turn in recent art and curatorial production. Through reasoned and attentive debate, the course of curating and exhibition making into the realm of the ‘educational’ is analysed, using both empirical and theoretical tools In recent years there has been increased debate on the incorporation of pedagogy into curatorial practice—on what has been termed “the educational turn” (“turn” in the sense of a paradigmatic re-orientation, within the arts). In this new volume, artists, curators, critics and academics respond to this widely recognized turn in contemporary art. This anthology presents an essential cultural question for anyone interested in the cultural politics of production at the intersections of art, teaching and learning.

Between Production and Display: On Teaching Curating to Fine Art Students

What is Research-led Teaching: Multi-disciplinary Perspectives (CREST/ GuildHE), 2012

The last few years have seen not only a significant increase in interest in the context and ‘sitedness’ of the artwork from within the museum, the studio and academic writing, but also a number of new undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in related subjects; such as museum studies, curatorial studies, and similar. Miwon Kwon states that “our understanding of site has shifted from a fixed, physical location to somewhere or something constituted through social, economic, cultural and political processes.” Alongside this, and a renewed interest in Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’ communicated through projects such as the Arnolfini/UWE ‘Situations’ project in Bristol, and the continuing questioning of the role of the studio as the sole originating framework for the interpretation of contemporary art, it seems a pertinent time to be encouraging students to rethink the relationship between artist and audience, artwork and context. The subject of this research is the Curatorial Practices pathway on the new three year BA (Hons) in Fine Art at Plymouth College of Art, and the pedagogical strategies utilised in encouraging Fine Art students to become critically astute practitioners, aware of their practice as ‘situated’ in varying contexts, rather than originating simply from the studio. The focus of this paper is the introductory first year module and how it was delivered in the first year of the programme. Students on this module looked at a range of curatorial practices, including collecting, archiving, exhibiting, writing and emerging modes (from ‘lo-fi’ curatorial strategies to the digital presentation and representation of work/s). However, beyond simply looking at modes of presentation, students were encouraged to question the social and ethical implications of the roles of the curator (or artist/curator). This research not only examines the delivery of ‘Curatorial Practices’ at Plymouth College of Art, but also argues that the consideration of ‘situation’ should be a central aspect of fine art education in the 21st Century.

A curator’s work is never done alone: curating as a condition, a method & an embedded form of labor

Curation, as a form of labor, is subject to changes in working conditions and methods like any other profession. Both formal and informal economies of labor have contributed to the constant transformation of curatorial practice, informing the ways in which art is organized in the social field. Changes in curation as a discipline, that is, in forms of labor and professionalization, impact how art is produced and therefore conceptualized and organized. The curator is no longer a passive and detached agent from the artist or the art object, but an active one in the cultural field, and in the production and reception of art.

POSTHUMAN PERFORMATIVITY OF THE CURATING- CURATORIAL

This text has two aims. 1. It maps out some recent discourses that differentiate curating from the curatorial. It looks into how this difference is produced and what other discourses can be read alongside of this discursive production in order to understand institutional and theoretical contexts for it. 2. Based on these discourses, the text addresses and emphasises the need for change in curatorial discourses and practices in time that understands urgency of post-anthropocentric thoughts, practices and world-making. It claims that curating and the curatorial needs to move away from socially oriented and human-centric representational and performative models of curating and curatorial into a mode that could be described as " posthuman performativity of the curating-curatorial "

OnCurating Issue 26, Curating Degree Zero / Curatorial Research

Ed. Dorothee Richter and Barnaby Drabble With contributions by Felix Ensslin, Dorothee Richter, Elke Krasny, Avi Feldman, Sabeth Buchmann, Brian Holmes, Ellen Blumenstein, Sergio Edelsztein The issue 26 of OnCurating related to the Zurich based Curating Degree Zero Archive concentrates on curatorial research. Contemporary curating exists as a media conglomerate; the production of meaning is achieved through a combination of artworks, photographs, commentary, publications, design, gestures, music, film, press releases, websites, and interviews. It is situated in a specific political and cultural context. To analyse these complex situations we need a variety of approaches; for every project the combination should alter, it makes a bricolage of methodical approaches necessary. The undertaking to discuss curating on a profound level also inspired the conferences Curating as a Glittering Myth, Curating as a Social Symptom, Curating as a Revolutionary Force?, and Curating Everything (Curating as Symptom). The ironic title of the second conference, Curating Everything, already proposed reading the activity of curating as a social symptom. We presume that the contemporary urge for a curatorial position has an imaginary side: the wish to gain authorship and agency as an illusionary closure in an overall unsteady and precarious labour situation for cultural producers. We would like to discuss curating in relation to changes in image production, changes in experiences of distance and modes of perception, changes in the conception of subjectivity and communities, changes in ways of the circulation of images, and changes in digital and material infrastructures. We would like to question curating with respect to topics of “race”, class, and gender. What can we propose as a critical attitude in curating achieved through ruptures, gaps, inconsistency, failures, and dissent? All contributors share an interest in political agendas in artistic and curatorial practices. The articles we want to present here show exemplarily how curating can be discussed not so much as case studies, but as scientific analyses. As for every critical debate, the writers have clear positions; they are not uninterested or aloof in any way or “neutral” and instead centre their arguments around a specific urgency. This urgency is then argued throughout in depth. With these varieties of approaches, we hope to offer future researchers some trajectories, new perspectives, and “methods”—in the above-mentioned sense—of debating curating.