CURATING AS POLITICAL ACTION
26 & 27 Feb 2022
REFLECTIVE NOTES: 10 hours
PART I- 26 Feb 2022 from 15:00 - 18:00 UTC
Curatorial Practices as Forms of Knowledge Production: A Workshop with Luisa Santos
Curating comes from Latin for “caring”, it is an organization of curiosities-biology (science labs)
I think immediately of:
Da Vinci’s anatomical and botanical drawings (predates formal “academic” or scientific curatorial practices…he essentially is the first formal western curator, no?)
-Joseph Cornell
-Mary Kelly
-Damien Hirst
-Josephine Meckseper
Luisa Santos introduced:
-German artist Joseph Beuys’ work…digging a hole/planting tree
-Kosovo artist Petrit Halilaj's “The Silent University”
-The 4 C’s: From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture
-Some of the “micro-narratives”...?
The Politics of Time and Space-The Power of Speculations
A) high risk = potential high gain
B) artists’ attempt to make apparent the systemic failure and loss of…?
C) mutability and (ex)change- new cultural production institutional strategy
D) Thinking ahead- a proposal- ask:
What types of knowledges are produced?
How is knowledge production also a political act?
PART II- 26 Feb 2022 from 18:30 - 20:00 UTC and 27 Feb 2022 from 15:00-16:30 UTC Curatorial (mono-, multi-, perma)cultures (of display): A Workshop with Fabíola Maurício
-Maricio encouraged the development of a shared vocabulary and critical discourse
-We viewed a TED Talk of Tania Bruguera's on artivism (art + activism = artivism); noted her newspaper as an artwork; political timing specific (art); Social affect transformed into social activism or social condition; and she discussed/promoted Art Conducte (Behavior/conduct art)
(I consider the process of ASSIMILATION...
migrant-->immigrant-->assimilated citizen of culture that one, or one's ancestors migrated to)
Maricio presented this linguistic equation:
Creative knowledge + practical knowledge = political knowledge
SUNDAY'S WORKSHOP GROUP EXERCISE:
-Maricio challenged small groups to Imagine that you have 6 months to prepare (envision) and implement a project on a political 'call out' of the current Putin's aggression on Ukrainians (and on western "democracy"). And to define the projects:
--AIMS
--GUIDELINES
--OPEN PATHWAYS TO IMPLEMENTATION OF PROJECT
I was in GROUP 2 along with Erin and Carrie. During our discussion, we entertained Erin's idea (to create a project involving) "skunking", (i.e., a word's meaning being the reverse of what it was originally or historically), and:
-curating an art exhibition around this idea
-conducting interviews or soliciting individual narratives of those who are experiencing first hand this phase of the war
-conducting and possibly filming a group discussion on the same
-the idea of not producing an art film, but considering the product being the intervention (discussions, statements...)
-a memorial for future wars (I note as long as the word "war" is skunked or means the opposite of what it has historically meant)
Later after our group presentation, Ana Fabiola Maurevia suggested that we conduct "mediation labs" with a persons who have current war stories/experiences and the artist/creative/curator facilitator
PART III- 27 Feb 2022 from 17:00-20:30 UTC
Curating Dissent- A Curatorial Approach to Postmedia Documentary Practices: A Workshop with Carles Guerra
We viewed and listened to lectures on one or more works by artists:
1. Carles Guerra-documentary film maker (see notes on interview of Antonio Negri*)
2. Allan Sekula**- photographer/documentarian
3. Susan Meiselas ?
4. Ariella Aisha Azoulay***-anti-imperialist; imperialist critic; creative curator; conceptual artist
art & language = art journal --> 1972 documenta 5 index --> translated into exhibition space consecrated artists comments on their own work
1990s our societies became places for communication about the nature of art, which is the exception to all other forms of labor.
cognitive capital=knowledge exchange humans are the technology...we are the gods, we are the government, we are the people...
1. Carles Guerra's film interview of *Antonio Negri, an Italian philosopher and writer of the late 20th c. and early 21st c. who wrote on self-organization generating connectivity and how that produces different work products compared to administrated labor schemes. Negri co-authored with Michael Hardt, "Empire" - early or 1st book on globalism. During the interview, Negri discusses what he thinks of when reading the letters of the latin alphabet...we watch/listen to his discussion of "A" and "B":
A=Augustine (as in Ste. Augustine...), transcendence...= Spinoza (democracy), and Machiavelli (humanism)
B= Biopower (imperialism+ empire rule =
monopolization of the weapon, i.e., post-industrial war complex;
monopolization of language/communication = CNN (maybe Fox now...?)
monopolization of biology (gene editing?)
**Allan Sekula- 1999 Waiting for the Tear Gas: from the White Globe to the Black Globe- 89 analog photos of Seattle WA, USA demonstrations against the World Bank...became an anti-photojournalistic action. Changed the course of documentary photography...invented a new form.
Multitude documentary practices make things happen...they act as a catalyst (journalist becomes a participant/creator vs. an "objective" by-stander
photography stopped being a simple way to capture events and it became an event or a catalyst for an event.
(I think of the US teenager Darnella Frazier's phone video that documented George Floyd's brutal murder by convicted police officer Derek Chauvin, which went viral and sparked the global phase of the Black Lives Matter movement. And I think of the evolution of the use of copying devices, which is detailed in artist David Hockney and physicist George Falco's Hockney-Falco theory outlined in "Secret Knowledge". It documents artists' use of copying devices from the pre-modern era beginning with van Eyck, and including daVinci, Durer, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Ingres, Warhol, Hockney, etc...(white western males= imperialist power holders of the modern period that gave them access to the objects or tools of power; magnifying lenses, camera obscura, camera lucida, portable 18th C. cameras, 20th C. projectors, etc.... and how now, in the 21st C., by comparison, many more "social groups" have much easier access to powerful copying devices)
***Ariella Aisha Azoulay- Readings 2, 3, 4 & 5-
A) Errata exhibition, which functioned as a guide a "potential history". It consisted of 800 images from archives that she collected, corrected and curated. It effectively RE-COLLECTS the history of cataloging African artifacts in Europe.
B) The Natural History of Rape was an exhibition of documents from archives that were part of post WWII Germany, but none documented the more than 200,000 rapes of German women that occurred. She created "Untaken Photographs" (see image at start of this entry of printed black rectangles within books)...very conceptual, but not minimalist.
C) And in Unshowable Photographs are drawings Azoulay traced and rewrote the accompanying subtext to...since she was not permitted to use the photos with her own text.
D) Un-Documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder a film by Azoulay, that looks at the acts of the West's stealing of "foreign" objects and keeping them precious in museums where they do not belong as acts of "imperial violence". She is an artist, critic, activist, curator, editorializer... https://vimeo.com/490778435
We stayed late and discussed Dorthea Lange's "Migrant Mother" as an icon of social justice during the time of the Great Depression, but which became an image of oppression to the "mother", Florence Owens Thompson, a Cherokee from OK, who later complained to the US Library of Congress to retitle it. They did not. I note that her personal identity is effectively forever erased...maybe sacrificed for the greater good...???
NOTE: Due to Russia's decade long war on Ukraine amplified a thousand fold this week, which made this particular weekend intensive a thousand fold more intense.
