Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

PAST PERIPHERY: CURATION IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
Patrick D. Flores
In the early part of 2005, Bangkok’s upscale mall
Gaysorn Plaza invited passersby around the busy
intersection of Sukhumvit and Ratchadamri to its spring/
summer collection of clothes with an advertisement that
read: “Different Creators, One Curator”. To a researcher
of curators of contemporary art in Southeast Asia, enlisting
the term “curator” to peddle merchandise was curious
as much as it was telling. Curious because I had
previously imagined the word to be circulating only
within a relatively restricted art world where it gains
currency; and telling because the specialist reputation
of the curator would in this instance yield to commonplace
misrecognition. It could be that the copywriter who had
thought of the line conceived of the mall as the curator
that gathers creators in a space, not unlike an impresario
who casts talents, organizes events, and makes things
happen, so to speak. This privilege notwithstanding,
the curator is to be distinguished from the creators who
are implicitly invested with the faculty of facture, or the
capacity to fabricate. That said, without the curator’s
devices of display, the creators and their coveted creations,
collected around the vogue of a season, may never reach
their public, an outcome that inevitably frustrates creation
and the esteem of creators.
On a typical day in the same year in Bandung, a city
south of Jakarta, 347/eat receives its regular clientele
of young people looking around for clothes, shoes, and
home fixtures exclusively made by the store. Bandung is
known for its so-called “factory outlets” that sell surplus
goods outsourced by global companies to what may
well be sweatshops of cheap labor. In these places, one
can buy original items at discounted rates from labels
like Abercrombie & Fitch and Prada, which apparently
are made in Bandung but leak out of the assembly line
for various reasons. 347/eat is different; it is called a
distro (distribution outlet) and does not mass-produce
clothes. Adjacent to its entrance is a space called Room
# 1, an initiative of a community of visual artists,
graphic designers, skaters, and surfers who hang out in
the premises. In this set-up, no curator holds the fort or
keeps the gate; artists, if they still want to call themselves
by that name, take up residence on their own. While at
Gaysorn there is an over-invested but under-explained
claim to curation, here the curator’s presence is faint and
barely heralded. A post-artist, post-exhibition moment,
HERITAGE, IDENTITY, CHANGE AND CONFLICT
therefore, may well generate a post-curatorial condition;
and that even without curatorial intervention, creators
make the means to connect with their public.
The mingling of curation with youth culture is instructive.
It opens up the term to a crucial reconsideration and
releases it to an ample range of appropriations. If we
track it as it slips through the margins of the art world,
we are initiated as well into the new modes by which
creative culture or affective labor stakes out uncharted
terrains. After roughly fifteen years, curation in Southeast
Asia has transformed vigorously, responding to various
pressures exerted by both the international art scene
and an increasingly exacting local art world. Discourses
about the concept of the contemporary and its relation
to modernity and its history of art have, indeed, decidedly
shaped it.
We note that the salient term here is “curator”, the person or
the personality, and not the verb “curate”, which may
lead us to what the act or the role of the curator entails.
The emphasis on it reveals a high regard for the power and
authority of the one who curates. The practice itself
broadly falls under curatorship, a word that belongs to
the more established museological system within which
curators are tasked as custodians of a collection that
must be made accessible to a public. The curator within
this setting and the curator of contemporary art are of
different species; they share the same name but operate
within disparate though not mutually exclusive contexts.
To exemplify the quandary, in the Thai language, the curator
is pantarak, which literally means keeper of things; in
contemporary art, art is not solely about things. When
I asked Somporn Rodboon, one of the first curators of
contemporary art in Thailand, if she would consider
herself a curator, she hesitated: “I do not keep things”.
She instead recommends the Thai term that means “the
person who organizes, selects, writes, and plans”. For
his part, her colleague Apinan Poshyananda, Director
of the Office of Contemporary Art and Culture, confided
that some Thai artists had initially thought the curator
to be a broker, an assignment akin to marketing careers
and commodities. And when Jim Supangkat ascribed
the role to himself in 1993, artists and the media took
fright and subjected him to rather hostile distrust. In
other words, at its inception, contemporary curation
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows
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