Curatorial Culture
At the risk of preaching to the choir, let me offer this text as essentially a plea for counting on history in the curatorial toolkit, primarily as a wake-up call, an anti-amnesiac in post-truth times if you will, now that so many leaders and their groupies remain keen on fueling war, propping up dictatorships, and making “difference” a reason to kill and to refuse basic rights. It is indeed tragic that too many today are intent on forgetting and making up the past in the most blatantly self-serving and incongruous ways. This is sadly true in the Philippines, and across the world, where at each site the ominous occurrence of forgetting is nuanced in its own way. We need not dwell too long on the pulse points in this broadened notion of region or spatial remit—there is Hong Kong, Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Japan, China, and so forth.
1 Teh, David. Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary. MIT Press, 2017.
2 Teh, 121.
Elsewhere, and in the 2019 year-end issue of Southeast of Now journal where I had the privilege of exchanging ideas with a cohort of generous Asianist scholars, we have Singapore National Art Gallery curator and historian Phoebe Scott invoking a particular strain of cosmopolitanism propelling the mobility of Vietnamese artists in Paris. Her essay suggests that a rereading of what appears as a strain of anti-modernism is conflated by both patriotism and a desire to exercise stake over the coveted place. I would argue that such carefully considered leverage or a highlighted stab at agency by artists is what history allows us to sense, but these would be something totally overlooked by curators who might opt to only look at objects from a lens blindly anchored on the “now” and thus unproductively fleeting and dispensable.
4 Taylor, Norah. “Art without History: Southeast Asian artists and their Communities in the Face of Geography.” Taylor and Francis Online, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00043249.2011.10790996
Precisely because, like most postcolonial sites, Asia continues to be associated with tropes of emergence, particularly in regard to contemporary art, Taylor also challenges us to think upon an expanded albeit temporal and possibly flimsy notion of “neighborhood,” and affinities which may be born of grassroots artists’ mobilization as opposed to protocol-laden and ceremonious geopolitics. To my mind, the Yogyakarta Biennale’s framing of country pairings in reference to the equator is in keeping with this. More importantly, Jogjakarta sets both art/artists and visitors off to sense socio-historical and spatial confluences which make for denser reads that might be satisfying not just sensorially but in multiple dimensions.
Undeniably, curation is about making art present. Through this, exposing the seams of history through what we do in exhibition making, platform making, and the other curatorial variants of our practices, perhaps becomes more purposeful.
To my mind, one of the real challenges of doing work in the cultural sphere today is about effecting candor in regard to the complications underpinning what we do. That of course can be attempted spatially, discursively, and experientially, counting on dynamic narrative flow, variable entry/exit points, scenography—the bag of tricks is deep because of seasoned interventions not just by theorist-historian-critics but by artist-designers and mediators. It is that imaginative working together that makes contrarian voices bounce off the walls and dangerously push buttons among our publics, not just to consume what we make but to hopefully come away moved to the point of non-perfunctory action. Quite obviously I’m very inclined to say that curation participates in crafting art history even when not overtly recognized as doing so. The question is, what kind of art history is being made in the process? Do we churn up the obvious and untroublesome, or ask the tough questions that might lead to our own embarrassment? Do we merely whet the inquisitive impulse or saturate by the way we do things? By all means, let us not tire of exceeding the preset logics of structure and history even as we still refrain from being foolish enough to ignore context. Sometimes ahistoricity issues out of naivete but also could be merely mercenary. I believe it is very much the curator’s job to sniff out what is hidden under the veneer of the official to hack away at what makes that impenetrable. Squeezing into institutional cracks is possibly where we can best be of use in this field of mystification. The parting pitch here is to keep our sense of time and space malleable, to stay creative but to also keep an eye out for some way to return to navigational anchors—that might be the redemptive place of art history. I leave you with questions inspired by what I heard during my very productive time spent at CIT19, and they are: How might we make curation more neighborly, particularly in regard to how people are engaged, and in how parallel practices such as art history, art education, and so on are not only begrudgingly lived with but are actually seen as healthily co-dependent? How to not just fan further facile antagonisms but instead mutually enable channels of discursive visibility?