art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

10
discussion, debate, conference, lecture, etc), and ‘silent language (of ideology)’
- communication as the field of unspoken and unwritten rules.
Curatorial practice is here understood as a specific (practice-oriented) discipline,
determined as an organizational and productive activity. The choice of the term
practice deliberately has a two-fold character: on the one hand, it refers to the
practical (non-theoretical) side of curatorial work (along with theoretical work),
considering professional decision-making, curatorial strategies, and the shifting
role of the curator (along with evolution of contemporary art practice); on the other
hand, it implies an expanded perspective on curating contemporary art and culture
in general (along with curating an art exhibition), considering the modes of artistic
and cultural production and organization, the investigations beyond the traditional
museum and gallery exhibitions, and even beyond the “autonomous” fields of the
art-world and art-system. Curatorial practice thus refers to relational elements of
art production within a broadly conceived (political, social, economic, and cultural)
framework that puts those art-worlds and art-systems into specific contexts, and
consequently – generates their value systems. The latter (just as the “silent language”
of curatorial theory) helps determining the ideology of exhibition making, what I would
also accept as a definition of the curatorial ideology. Accordingly:
“The ideology of exhibition is not an aggregate of oriented and entirely rationalized
intentions of its organizers (curators, authors of concept, financiers, cultural workers,
politicians). The ideology is a precarious atmosphere (environment) of conceptualized as
well as non-conceptualized possibilities, decisions, symbolizations, solutions, proclamations,
oversights (erasure), fortuitous choices, selections, proposals, values, tacit insights,
censorships, the effects of public and tacit taste, justifications, desires and social functions
that form some sort of acceptable reality of the exhibition from the perspective of society
and culture. In other words, the ideology of an exhibition or a family of exhibitions is not
the order (text) of messages that the authors of exhibition are projecting and proclaiming
in their introductory or accompanying texts; it is that difference between the intended
and the unintended, the acceptable and the unacceptable in relation of the public and
the tacit scene: the conscious and the unconscious, i.e., the literal and the fictional. The
ideology of exhibition is not that which is meant to be accepted by public opinion (doxa)
but, paradoxically, that which constitutes doxa and represents its expression (a single
case) in some sort of exchange of ‘social values’ and ‘social powers.” [1]
In traditional art-historical usage the term ‘curating’ is broadly synonymous
with exhibiting art. However, I would claim that curating in a contemporary sense
conceives the phenomenon of exhibition only as one (not even the most important,
though most visible) out of many fragments constitutive for the working process of a
contemporary curator. Considering the popular description of exhibiting practices as
the “politics of display” or “politics of representation”, this connection between art
and politics is a challenge to what we take to be the contemporary view of Eastern
European (or any other non-hegemonic) art as a realistic mirroring of the world.
It is, in fact, only apparently realistic and (as in Rastko Močnik’s terms) offers us
instead a paradoxical formula that this art is a realized abstraction. The question is