And whenever I am in the position of curating something… to me it always ends up working with other people and this will be a reflection of what the curatorial for me is, it is about expanding the world through making things, with other people, and also of somehow facilitating and developing a collective intelligence and collective sensibility that perhaps goes beyond individual selves. Because in my romantic political way of thinking, I don’t want to subscribe to the notion of the brilliant self. This is exactly what the art world and art market runs on, it’s a star system, the notion of the individual that is so special, and it introduces and implements such a special way of seeing things, that it has a value, it is a value making machine. I mean it’s a continuous valorisation of always making more value out of something. The collective intelligence that emerges out of these projects, that are curated, but at the same time, they totally rely upon on the individuals paradoxically. That is what excites me. I also realise that curating allowed me or taught me to be more authentic to people – it might be a nice line to end on.1
Raimundas Malašauskas, What Spills
Looking from afar-and online Raimundas Malašauskas 2013 Oo curatorial project was a welcomed experiment. The Lithuanian and Cypriot pavilion of the Venice Biennale, interrupted some of the more tired and polite conventions of the group exhibition, the site-specific response, the exhibition catalogue, audience engagement; and made any regard for the national representation seem somewhat absurd – critical in its apoliticism. For Claire Bishop, the curatorial premise was a mood, a treasure hunt, time travel, a conspiracy theory, rather than an argument.2 For Bishop the project’s value was to “chafe the main event,” “randomly interweaving the curated and the non-curated produced a distended parallel universe.”3
What Spills, a guest lecture by Malašauskas in February 2017 followed his 2-day curatorial project, On Campus, which was hosted by MUMA and situated partly on the university campus in which I work. Unbeknownst to the audience, the lecture replayed parts of On Campus but on the whole made no explicit attempt at describing the different components of the project. An invite only event, it sat somewhere between a guided tour of existing spaces, knowledge and research at the university and a workshop between creative practitioners that privileged intuition, improvisation and the kinaesthetic.4
Perhaps disgruntled that I wasn’t invited, I understand that exclusion is the flip-side and therefore part of any participatory art event. A non-invite has a potential critical value, in that we can reflect on the implications of those social exclusions – it of course can also perpetuate existing dominant power structures. On this occasion, I perversely enjoyed catching furtive glimpses of the tour when I was at the vending machine, the chance encounter with uber-curator doing the campus’ hokey Museum of Computing History as a curatorial readymade. 5 This type of work invites not only accounts from participants from the inside but the no less valuable accounts constructed by the mediation of documentation, rumours and hearsay.
Back in the lecture, Malašauskas was tentatively sketching out a curatorial imperative. He “wanted to curate an exhibition in the mind of the audience.” Here he described his guided meditation or hypnosis, what he called daydreaming that he and the artist and hypnotherapist Marco Lutyens had initiated in previous exhibitions. Facilitating this mindfulness session that evening alongside Elena Narbutaitethe abstract video of flickering coloured LED lights alongside Marco Lutyens recorded voice, guiding you towards relaxation as if you were an octopus. This is how it differed from traditional meditation sessions. It somehow embraced and followed distractions and absurdly envisaged the body as an octopus whilst making oblique references to the 2-day event. I felt uncomfortable. Daydreaming requires a type of vulnerability or a personal reverie that I didn’t feel like performing within my two intersecting workplaces, the art world and the university. Besides I could get some free mindfulness sessions through the university’s health service or like many corporate workplaces in search of increased productivity tap into the HR version of the same practice. Apparently when Lutyens facilitates this live, there’s touching. Was this the “embodied knowledge” that Malašakaus was alluding to? Was Malašakaus curating me?
This incorporation of the audience’s personal space, overlayed with the insularity of the On Campus event, the under-attributing (at best) and the misappropriating (at worst) of the 5-6 artworks used in his lecture-turned-artwork cast a shadow in my own mind on Malašakaus’ fantasy exhibition. This curatorial approach is described by Elena Filopovic “as the vehicle for the production of knowledge and intellectual debate” over the particularities of any one artwork.6 More commonly enacted with the bravura of the install photograph or the tendency to privilege curatorial discourse in art criticism. The limited context provided for Audrey Cottin, Marco Luyton, Ziga Testan, Elena Narbutaite and George Catar artworks and designs continued a type of attribution that didn’t resemble a librarian’s citation – but more like a comment made under one’s breath at a dinner party. Lifestyle culture’s co-option of the curatorial was made literal when Malašakaus recounted a dinner party. Imagine he said if you were served a roast, then the host (or curator) turns the roast into a soup, that turns into a pâté, all whilst reading and rewriting the recipe. It was low-tech version of molecular gastronomy offered as analogy for the curatorial.
Perhaps it was the performance format of the lecture, the architecture of the lecture theatre that elicits a particular hierarchal relation between audience and speaker. Education theorists are trying to eradicate this mode of learning from university programs on the one hand whilst rusted-on-academics are hanging onto these spaces for their dear lives. And while this lecture like so many artists’ lectures did not share the didactic quality of the traditional academic mode, through the cracks of the absurdity we now had Malašakaus words to pin to his curation. In his exhibitions, the resistance to the explicit makes sense. He is allowing the audience to direct the terms of the framing. The curator Maria Lind points out that “reverence towards the work of art” has its own problems. She notes that “it is suspiciously close to resting upon ideas about art as detached from the rest of our existence; and it often conceals the concept of a curator as ‘pure provider’ who simply supports an artist without affecting the exhibition and its reception.”7 Malašakaus’ curatorial affect on artists’ production switches between absent to obfuscating. This arguably manifests in the perfumed 3 volume catalogue for the On Campus event, having no printed pages, available only to participants, and the basic information regarding itinerary, script and sources—designed as cursory inserts so they could to slip out. For all the appearance of explication in the catalogue-turned-designer-note-book and the potential in the lecture itself, it’s hard to avoid the special sense of the individual that Malašakaus intends to avoid and hard to read the aforementioned “collective sensibilities” coming from any other individual besides Malausakas. Was this all about Raimundas?
Branch meeting
The professional implications of Malašakaus amplified sense of self, his charisma propped as it was in front of the lectern and its relation to artistic practice propelled me to reflect on my response immediately after the lecture. And since the lecture openly engaged a personal space, I wondered how these professional implications would manifest on a psychological level. And by extension, how this particular dynamic between artist and curator relates to the artwork’s public, artists self-organisation and labour.
In the lecture’s question time, one might think that I asked some hard-hitting question: how does a fast-and-loose approach to the documentation of art affirm the under-represented within the elite field of art his projects are based in? Perhaps I could be more generous and seek to explore how Malašakaus’ own creative practice critiques so-called conservative notions of authorship. Between being what I thought should be my role as an appreciative staff member at the hosting institution and an artist that probably at some level wants to be picked by this curator, I responded to Malašakaus with a comment dressed up as question. Your lecture reminds me of a religious ritual, I would say. Surely this was a back-handed compliment, no one wants to be religious, right? And I kept on saying how fantastic it was, over and over again. This statement driven as it was by nerves and unprocessed anger was really the surface of some thoughts regarding not only the institutional structures that support Malašakaus practice but also plain old industrial relations for the artist.
Anton Vidokle’s “Art without Artists” is a rallying call for this predicament. Echoing a dogmatic class struggle, Vidokle counter-intuitively pits the wage-earning curator against the free enterprising artist.8 The curator for the Vidokle is the scape-goat of the artists’ woes, his hyperbolic language not allowing for the space to recognise the hyper-individualism of the artist. For many artists, part of their professional survival depends on being selected or employed by management structures with curators at the helm. We want to be picked and that means invariably there’s a whole lot of people who aren’t. The artist Natalie Thomas says it best in a blog post:
“Curating art is a profession of exclusion rather than one of inclusion…. In a perverse and reverse alchemy, art history is written around the golden careers of certain artists who are promoted as shorthand motifs for various styles, eras, or movements, with all others edited out or retained as footnotes, orbiting dust in the dark peripheral clouds of obscurity.”9
Thomas’ “dark peripheral clouds” leads me to Gregory Sholette Dark Matter analogy of the of the art world. It describes the “great mass” that is invisible, but also plays a significant impact on the art world’s constitution and function.10 Dark Matter for Shollete is the cultural production of amateurs, technicians, informal, unofficial, activist, non-institutional workers, and so-called failed artists that make up the mass of the art world, yet they’re on the whole invisible to the elite cultural gatekeepers – curators, directors, collectors, critics, historians and artists. This pyramid structure ignores the heterogeneous creativity of these practices but relies on this mass for audience, competition, education and fabrication.11 This is not as dismal as it might first seem as much of this creative labour is as Shollete notes operating “through economies based on pleasure, generosity and the free dispersal of goods and services, rather than the construction of a false scarcity required by the value structure of art world institutions.”12 In relation to the field of art that Malašakaus is part of, Dark Matter highlights the arbitrary value structures that treats this large group tokenistically. And whist there’s intersecting opportunities derived from self-publishing and peer-driven initiatives, why do we overwhelmingly recognise and legitimate only one particular type of recognition?
“Art Without Artists” is a demarcation dispute. This is where there’s a disagreement between trade unions about what types of work should be done by the members of each union. Vidokle defends the artist’s sovereignty from the authorial over-reach of the curator, now deemed as an equivalent ‘cultural producer’ thus masking any power inequity. He notes:
“While some artists occasionally do work as curators, it’s important to acknowledge that the relationship between artists and curators is structurally somewhat like the relationship between workforce and management: like the workers, most artists suspect that their “supervisors,” the curators, do not really understand the art, that they are controlling, egocentric, and ignorant, and are mismanaging the (art) factory and mistreating the producers…”13
It’s hard not to agree with at least Vidokle’s primary management analogy. The curator in most cases doles out the gigs essentially using subjective criteria whilst every attempt is made to make this process seem “objective, systematic, almost scientific, which most of the time it is not.”14 There are alternatives with Melbourne’s wealth of artist-run initiatives, here artists are able to self-organise. Tamsin Green has noted however that in the quest to achieve a type of professionalism some artist-run initiatives replicate the bureaucratic structures and ambitions of government run project spaces to exhibit the generically framed “conceptually and technically ambitious” artwork. She asks where’s the specific alternative agenda?15 In addition, funding structures and some public perception, still pigeon-hole artist-run initiatives as exhibiting “practice in an initial phase of a career that will develop into a commercially viable practice.” This is the artist-run initiative as stepping stone to somewhere else.16
So, this emulation of the dominant paradigm, with the curator or a pseudo-curator at the head prevails in many ways even within artist self-organisation. By replicating these systems, we are validating the status-quo’s mode of cultural dissemination. This additional labour by artists is on the whole voluntary. We exploit each other and we exploit ourselves alongside maintaining our own practices and the jobs that pay rent etc. It’s exhausting but necessary. We do need to as Vidokle claims expand the modes that make art public rather than “perpetuate existing institutions of art and their agents at the expense of the agency of artists by immortalizing the exhibition as art’s only possible, ultimate destination.” 17 But how do we make this sustainable in the long run?
I can’t help but feel like some sort of scab. My issue with Vidokle is his argument hinges on the romantic role of the artist. Vidokle defends and privileges the artist’s autonomy over all others. In Vidokle’s framework, the artist’s partial autonomy is sacrosanct. We can beg, borrow or steal from any field and practice. The curator however, so wedded to the survival and perpetuation of institutional art, so tied to the strings attached to their wage, so reductive in their use of an artwork as mere syntax beyond the perfunctory care, framing and administration––is complicit. But the artist’s shit is gold line, I don’t buy. Artists are no less complicit in upholding conservative agendas for art practice that might turn a stylistic convention into a small business opportunity.
A taste for the precarious
An artist’s labour is precarious, but not in the precarious way a minimum wage earner with casual unreliable employment is precarious. Although the deregulation of job markets certainly entails artists searching for alternative sources of income within insecure job markets to support creative endeavours.
As Mel Jordan from the Freee art collective notes:
“Precarity embodies distinctions; being precarious as a working-class wage labourer is rotten; choosing a lifestyle of cultural work that is never secure is a different matter. Differences in kinds of paid and unpaid work must be discussed, not in terms of the work that you are doing, for example immaterial creative work versus working in a call centre, remember that this labour is not economically different, but a good job, attractive labour, is more to do with your working conditions and union representation than with the type of thing you are doing.”18
The more pertinent point to make is not that our artistic labour is precarious but to ask what the quality of this precarity is? The artist’s work does not entail conventional labour relations. Artists are after all are self-employed on the whole. There are only so many jobs with a lot of contenders. That’s not even scratching the surface of who gets to contend. The starting line often being a culturally homogenous lot. That is why the activist work of Natty Solo, Elvis Richardson with the Countess Report and the curator/artist Leuli Eshraghi in dealing with the under-representation of women and first-nations people is so important. But even if the contenders were more culturally representative and/or diverse, this would not produce a meritocracy.
So decisions need to be made in relation to what to include and not include. What is the basis of these decisions? For Pierre Bourdieu:
“tastes ( i.e., manifested preferences) are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other tastes. In matters of taste, more than anywhere else, all determination is negation… This means that the games of artists and aesthetes and their struggles for the monopoly of artistic legitimacy are less innocent than they seem.”19
The artist Andrea Fraser in her study of Bourdieu continues this line stating:
“every judgment then becomes a referendum, not on the work, but on the dominance, the legitimacy, the authorship, of the judge whose pronouncement must be defended all the more violently to conceal their fundamental arbitrariness”20)
It was a liberating moment for me to read Fraser’s account of Bourdieu in 2007. Much time is spent as an artist grappling with the taste and acknowledgement of other agents within the field of art. Whenever I would not hear from a curator after a meeting, I would think about this arbitrariness. For Bourdieu, it is very easy to misrecognise this authority or this management of taste for something natural or universal. This is a difficult self-help mantra to maintain however. How do we continually assert creative practice that doesn’t necessarily fit within the dominant but unacknowledged idiosyncrasies of taste?
Assessment criteria
There’s an elephant in the room. I’m a wage earner at Monash University. In my judgement of the curatorial judgment, I need to acknowledge that judgement is also part of my bread and butter. The judgments that we uphold in various capacities in art schools sometimes intersect with the aforementioned vagaries of the art world – sometimes they don’t. Two ideas from Bourdieu apply here. The first regards the value of the judgement within a school, where “academic qualifications are a weak currency and only work within the limits of the academic market.”21 The second is that “education is in fact one of the most effective means of perpetuating the existing social pattern, as it both provides an apparent justification for social inequalities and gives recognition to the cultural heritage, that is, to a social gift treated as a natural one.”22 Within an art school we not only have the arbitrary application of taste or tastes but also the interesting problem of providing access to those measures of taste so that there’s an understanding of assessment, both within the bureaucratic measure of the university and the field of art. For Bourdieu, the cultural capital the student embodies prior to their commencement of art school influences the engagement with culture whilst at art school. Within an Australian context, the decimation of the TAFE system and the deregulation of university quota schemes, the potential for inequity has widened. And even if student with less cultural and economic capital succeeds in the system, this doesn’t test the status quo but makes it stronger. It now appears that it’s a meritocracy.
Assessment in creative courses makes me feel uneasy, especially the part where a single numerical score is devised. You might argue that assessment criteria and their rubric circumvent this arbitrariness. I would argue mostly they mask it in abstract terms like critical, sophisticated, sensitivity and reflexive. A rubric is only a transparent tool if all terms and performance levels are clearly defined. This would be possible, and interesting exercise in defining already contested abstract qualities and matching them to material evidence. For most it would be mind-boggling tedious task, bit like writing the terms and conditions of insurance scheme for your possibly bright future. Art, design and architectural schools on the most part have addressed the arbitrary via the engagement of panels and multiple assessors. But there is still a calculation of the grade. There’s never going to be a move on this one. Art schools (as opposed to the Design and Architecture departments) are minnows within large cooperate institutions based on standards and standardisations across the fields. As long as these institutions underwrite what they consider generous allocation of spaces for studios, galleries, technologies and funding for creative research, there’s always going to be a quid pro quo. Why can’t art student receive a series of critiques that are potentially contradictory? Allowing them a space to grapple with the absolute different perspectives and not one number that communicates that some consensus has been reached. In art at least, we really do and should have time for those outliers, right?
Talking it out
As a way of initiating a dispute resolution between the curatorial and the artistic, avoiding so called independent arbitration, as there’s no such thing, I acknowledge that as an artist I’m part of the distribution of insidiously symbolic violence.23 In rereading some Bourdieu I was taken by his definition of taste not only as a determination of negation but also that it is “provoked by horror or visceral intolerance (‘sick-making’) of the taste of others.”24 At first this might seem overstated. But after Malašakaus’ lecture, we (a group of artists) kept discussing how icky we felt. It was taste at work, regardless of how intellectually it was being justified. At Meyers Place bar, we safely applied our own arbitrary sense of the arbitrary, developing our own social capital with a drink or two. Our artistic professional practice is one of self-interest and competition but it also has this type of social space, what I would call a disorganised union. This informal workplace union might counterpoise some of the aforementioned bleakness and/or cynicism. It collapses our creative professions into our everyday lives. This invasion of private social space by other workplaces would ordinarily leave you dry. There would be cries relating to work/life balance, forms of technology facilitating access by management within a 24hr cycle. To some degree we welcome these intrusions and these spaces become forums where we test the legitimacy of cultural practice with our peers. How do we make this public and transparent? There’s no use in critiquing a curator’s work once they’re out of the country. There’s no use in independent artist initiated projects if they replicate pre-existing structures. There’s no use in arts academia if we respond (like I did) to practice with polite platitudes. This only makes structures of management seamlessly run through the three sectors mentioned.
Unfortunately, these conversations, debates and/or arguments require time and more open and accessible platforms. The most professionally rewarding part of CLUBSproject (an artist-run initiative I was part of a decade ago), were the feedback sessions facilitated around artworks. A forum was created for each artwork where detailed observation was demanded and often exhausted; interpretation was challenged; complicated formulations inevitable; and tangents that even Malašakaus would get behind thoroughly pursued. This type of dialogue can assert the complex constitution of practice beyond the 100 word quips, blurbs and questions found in mainstream press, public forums and openings. It sets up talk between curators and artists outside of studio visits and application panels/ job interviews. It was just one way of thinking about different platforms that frames art, artists labour and the discursive. It required you to sit with your words – test assumptions – be explicit – fudge the words – try again. It was as Malašakaus would describe a way of building a collective sensibility or collective intelligence in all its discordant difference that perhaps went beyond individual intention of the singular artist and/or curator.
Raimundas Malašauskas, What Spills. MADA Fine Art Postgraduate Symposium Closing Keynote, transcription, February 16 2017. Unpublished recording kindly provided by Monash University Museum of Art for this paper. ↩
Claire Bishop. “Now you see it.” Artforum International, September 2013, 319. ↩
Ibid. ↩
I pieced together On Campus’ 2-day schedule from informal conversations from 3 invited participants. ↩
Museum of Computing History, Monash University, Caulfield campus. ↩
Elena Filopovic. “The Global White Cube.” In OnCurating.org Issue 22, April 2014: The politics of Display. http://www.on-curating.org/issue-22-43/the-global-white-cube.html#.WQFHG2WIBnk (accessed April 25, 2017). ↩
Maria Lind. “Stopping my Process: A statement.” In Stopping the Process: Contemporary Views on Art and Exhibitions, edited by M. Hannula, Helsinki: NIFCA, 1998. ↩
Anton Vidokle. “Art Without Artists?” e-flux Journal. May 2010. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/16/61285/art-without-artists/ (accessed April 25, 2017). ↩
Natalie Thomas. “Bursting Bill’s Bubble: the Plebs vs. the Poseurs.” Natty Solo. April 13, 2017. https://nattysolo.com/2017/04/13/bursting-bills-bubble-the-plebs-vs-the-poseurs (accessed April 25, 2017). ↩
Gregory Sholette. “Heart of darkness: A Journey into the Dark Matter of the Art World.” In Visual Worlds, edited by John R. Hall, Blake Stimson and Lisa T. Becker, New York: Routledge, 2005. ↩
Gregory Sholette. “Dark Matter: Activist Art And The Counter-Public Sphere.” http://www.gregorysholette.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/05_darkmattertwo1.pdf (accessed April 25, 2017), 5. ↩
Ibid., 6 ↩
Anton Vidokle. “Art Without Artists?” e-flux Journal. May 2010. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/16/61285/art-without-artists/ (accessed April 25, 2017). ↩
Anton Vidokle and Nkule Mabaso. “Interview with Anton Vidokle.” In OnCurating.org Issue 22, 2014: The Politics of Display. http://www.on-curating.org/files/oc/dateiverwaltung/issue22/PDF_to_Download/ONCURATING_Issue22_A4.pdf (accessed April 25, 2017). ↩
Tamsin Green. “Run Run Run Run Run.” Boxcopy. 2010. https://boxcopy.org/publications/run-run-run-run-run-tamsin-green/ (accessed April 25, 2017). ↩
Tamsin Green. “Spatio-types: future models” Runway: Experimental Art Writing. Issue 23, 2013. http://runway.org.au/spatio-types-future-models/ (accessed April 25, 2017). ↩
Anton Vidokle. “Art Without Artists?” e-flux Journal. May 2010. ↩
Freee art collective (Mel Jordan). “When Work is More than Wages.” In OnCurating.org Issue 16, 2012: The Precarious Labour in the Field of Art. http://www.oncurating.org/files/oc/dateiverwaltung/old%20Issues/ONCURATING_Issue16.pdf
(accessed April 25, 2017). ↩Pierre Bourdieu. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984, 49. ↩
Andrea Fraser, “It’s Art When I Say It’s Art, or. . ., ” In Museum highlights: the writings of Andrea Fraser, edited by Alexander Alberro, Cambridge, Mass: Mit Press, 2005, 42; Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993 ↩
Pierre Bourdieu. ”Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction,” In Power and Ideology in Education, edited by Karabel and Halsey, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 507. ↩
Pierre Bourdieu. “The School as a Conservative Force: Scholastic and Social Inequalities.” In Contemporary Research in the Sociology of Education, edited by J. Eggleston, London, Methuen, 1974, 34. ↩
Pierre Bourdieu. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984, 56. ↩
Ibid. 56. ↩