Expanding Internationalism - A Conference on ... - Mary Jane Jacob

pieces of Pueblo pottery made by women potters) as a way of
cross-referencing it with her own society in order to establish the
struggle of women to be seen as "primary makers of meaning. "
Or, for
example, recent sculpture by the Brazilian Jac Leimer which involved
collecting and sorting tens of thousands of devalued banknotes, and
bringing to light the notes as carriers of anonymous popular graffitti.
In these examples, artists are acting in one sense as curators. Or
rather, they use the metaphor of curating ironically to show the illusion
of "objective" observation: to observe is to remake, reform. It's
curious that the word "curator," which I think has been a noun in English
in its museum sense since at least the 18th century, has only recently
become a verb.
I think the conflict between artist and curator has, thus,
been one of values, not of metier as such, and the denunicatory metaphors
of curating which artists have used have been metaphors of control,
master:y, and disinfection. For example, as along ago as the early '70s,
the American artist Robert Smithson exhibited as his "work" at "Doctmle!lta"
a statement, of which this is part:
Cultural confinement takes place when a curator ircposes his own
limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his
limits. Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent catagories.
Some artists imagine they've got a hold on this apparatus, which in
fact has got a hold of them.
As a result they end up supporting a cultural prison which is out of
their control ... Museums like asylums and jails, have wards and cells
-- in other words, neutral rooms called "galleries" ... The function
of the warden-curator is to separate art from the rest of society ....
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