Part five of a story I wrote called Glyph. It’s rough and unfinished but should be entertaining. You can search for the other parts using the search box in the top right hand corner.
His memory was flawless. Apart from having absolutely nothing from before he was thirteen when he work up alone in a hospital bed with the doctor unable to find any trace of him on any database. Whatever put him there had left his body covered in tiny wounds and a long, thin and perfectly straight scar along the left side of his skull. From that moment onwards, Duncan had been building himself from scratch.
Duncan pushed open the large steel up-and-over door of his single room flat. The dank sunlight filled the single room, barely casting any shadows. It wasn’t sparse. Duncan just didn’t have much stuff. People who lived in what was a stack of converted storage containers didn’t tend to have a lot of possessions. Duncan lived at the very top of seven storeys of concrete. It gave him a great view first thing when he left his flat but was bitterly cold in the Winter. Duncan looked over the favela that this part of the city had become. He took a deep breathe of what would be the last mostly-clean air for a while and made his way down the bolted-on stairwell tower.
“How may I help you?” said the smartly dressed girl behind the front desk.
“I’m here for a 1 o’clock interview. My name is Duncan.”
“Please take a seat. Someone will be with you shortly.”
The girl’s irises were an unnaturally bright green. As Duncan took a step back towards the rigid plastic chair, the green of the girl’s iris looked like it began to bleed into the rest of her eye until two emerald pools stared out from her flawless pale skin. She then raised her hands and her fingernails glowed the same colour. Duncan watched as she moved her fingers in front of her like some kind of elaborate dance of sign language.
“That’s an augment I’ve not seen before,” said Duncan. The girl turned her head towards him and the colour quickly returned to the normal position. She made a small smile.
“It’s new,” she said, “Only got it last month. It’s so much quicker now.” Duncan sat down and let the girl get back to work. He was glad to sit. The nerves were building up inside him. He watched the people in the Central Auditerminal. Some were browsing the variety of shops that went all around the edge. Some were sitting, reading or on talking on phones. A few were taking pictures of the four grand exhibits placed in this room. Most people carried suitcases or bags. Some were passing right on through to check into their flights. A number of people walked past Duncan to climb the marble staircase next to him. They strolled around the mezzanine before disappearing into the exhibition galleries of the museum. After fifteen minutes, a woman came striding across the auditorium with a slightly frantic edge to the way she walked. Her hair was ash blonde with slightly lighter grey strands in it. She wore all black. She gave Duncan a well rehearsed smile of greeting that made fine dignified wrinkles appear. She offered Duncan her hand.
“You must be Duncan. Sorry to keep you waiting. I’m Jonquil, the Deputy Curator here.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Duncan said as he shook her hand.
“Come this way, I’ll give you a quick tour first then talk about what you want to do whilst you’re volunteering here. It’s only me giving the interview I’m afraid as our Head Curator is in meetings all day.”
“That’s fine by me.”
“I’m sure you meet him soon.”
Copyright 2010. Pete Newcurator. Newcurator.com
UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt MP has proposed abolishing the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. “Government support for museums, libraries and archives will continue”. The proposed wind-up date is 2012. This news comes soon after the cuts to English Heritage and their resulting recruitment freeze. They have a lot more to look forward as the DCMS is “considering the role and remit”.
So what does this mean? A lot more unemployed in the culture sector for starters as the most likely replacement will be a small team within the Culture department. A lack of a national body to oversea museums probably means that local councils will be able to do what they like. Can we expect a bunch of new job losses in the smaller museums? Or what’s stopping the selling of collections?
Presentism, as this blog often cites, is the short-term decisions of living in the Present over building for a long-term future. Now is important over working out where we are going. I am a firm believer that growth is the way get us out of problems and cuts do not promote growth.
I ask all of you now; with the MLA going soon, will you miss it? How will it affect you? What do you foresee happening? Drop a comment below (it may take some time to approve).
And if anyone in another country wants to see my CV, send me an email.
Guest post from N. Elizabeth Schlatter
What does “the curatorial” mean? I’ve been wrestling with this concept since I first read (and re-read) Maria Lind’s essay for Artforum from October 2009. Lind’s brief article posits the controversial 2008 S?o Paulo Biennial (in which one of four floors in the Pavilion was left empty) as an example of the curatorial. Lind begins her piece with the following:
Is there something we could call the curatorial? A way of linking objects, images, processes, people, locations, histories, and discourses in physical space? An endeavor that encourages you to start from the artwork but not stay there, to think with it but also away from and against it? I believe so…
I’ve since seen the term in several articles, some published prior to Lind’s and learned via this article by artist and e-flux co-founder Anton Vidokle of a recent conference held in Leipzig on this very topic, which is described as “a practice which goes decisively beyond the making of exhibitions.”
I thought I had a grasp on the curatorial until Vidokle very politely asked me to clarify his position as not being critical of the theory at least in principle, after I had suggested the opposite in my earlier NewCurator post about the expanding spectrum of what can be defined as curatorial activity. [See update to previous post, which includes a quote regarding his opinion of the curatorial.]
What is the curatorial then? And why does it seem focused on exhibitions as a starting point (“beyond exhibitions”) when organizing exhibitions is but one albeit highly visible aspect of a curator’s responsibilities? And are curators in disciplines other than modern and contemporary art engaged with the curatorial or is it a theory situated firmly in today’s art?
Why is this concept so elusive? I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a rigorous reader of theory. I’m sure that presents the biggest challenge to grasping this idea, which Lind likens to “Chantal Mouffe’s notion of ‘the political’, an aspect of life that cannot be separated from divergence and dissent, a set of practices that disturbs existing power relations.”
When Jens Hoffmann, director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, declares, “My voice in making an exhibition is equally important as that of the artist,” is that the curatorial in action? Hoffmann’s quote comes from the 2007 publication Ice Cream, and follows this statement, “To make a provocative claim, it’s curators who have contributed to art to effect greater change in the art world than artists (I refer here, of course, to both negative and positive effects.)”
Later on Hoffmann says, “The shift in curatorial practice is a result of the increasingly close relationship between artists and curators and the utilization of artists’ practices by curators.” I imagine that the borrowing of artists’ practices would include institutional critique, which Lind specifies when she says she imagines a mode of curating that operates “like an active catalyst, generating twists, turns, and tensions—owing much to site-specific and context-sensitive practices and even more to various traditions of institutional critique.”
Is the curatorial a further internalization by museum professionals of the re-definition of institutional critique that artist Andrea Fraser articulated in her 2005 Artforum article “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique”? As in, to quote Fraser, “It’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution.” She continues, “It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kinds of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to.”
Is the curatorial inevitable? Or is it too late and too uninformed to ask that question? Is the curatorial, much like the over-use of the word “curator,” a development already so embraced and enmeshed in practice that there’s no turning back? Everyone seems to be acknowledging changes in the profession of the curator, but is this the actual progression or is it more an affinity being articulated by curators and theorists?
So, let’s talk curatorial-ly. Please. And preferably not steeped too heavily in cultural theory jargon. Did any of you attend the conference in Leipzig? Care to offer any observations on that or other essays, conversations, or ideas you’ve had?
Every Monday, I’ll be posting snippets of a story I wrote called Glyph. It’s rough and unfinished but should be entertaining. Here’s part four.
Chapter Two
Duncan had kept a meticulous record of every job he applied for. Every record included the original posting, the job description, the person specification, a copy of his application including his personal statement. Each record was sorted into date order of application deadlines. Each application was a small improvement on the last. The last item of each record was a rejection letter, or a page with a simple red cross on it if there wasn’t a response. Duncan had kept three hundred and twenty eight records of unsuccessful application for every position he could. Including several letters enquiring about internships or volunteering. He kept copies of the records digitally in several places, keeping them in sync but also had four binders of paper copies on the second-hand desk in his one room flat.
Record number three hundred and twenty nine was opened. Duncan inserted the final item: a letter inviting him to an interview with regards to becoming a volunteer at The Intramunicipal Museum. The letter had been stuck to his concrete wall for a week to remind him and to revel in it a little. It was only volunteering, but Duncan felt he had something to prove. Duncan was bright. Not a high grade student but a solid performer all the way through his educational career. It was down to Duncan never forgetting anything. Everything he heard, saw and read was stored away and instantly recalled. All standards tests said that Duncan wasn’t a savant or even struggled with containing that much information. He could just store it away. It made all of his teachers and lecturers unnerved as he sat there without making any notes. It didn’t make him popular with them either when he pointed out their contradictions.
Copyright 2010. Pete Newcurator. Newcurator.com
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