Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

10
SESSION I
instilled in the art community both the awe of authority
(the museum) and the indeterminacy of the foreign and
the external (the independent curator), who is pictured
as an unknown quantity, as it were, an interloper who
interferes and usurps artistic prerogatives.
Surely, the museological world has radically changed. But
as curators of contemporary art pursue their goals, they
carry with them the freight of this tradition, partly because
of the prevailing hegemony of the museological logic and
partly because they still work within this logic even as
they put it under erasure at the same time. Moreover,
the practice of curatorship lies well within the customs of
representation, visibility, and legitimation, virtues that
contemporary art still solicits and oftentimes channels
into spectacle. Having said that, the word curatorship
may also have ceded its institutional control to a more
active and reciprocal exchange of entitlements between
curators and the other members of the art world. It is in
this disposition that the term curation is accepted with
more favor, as it implies the activity rather than the
position, status, or convention that is ironically identified
with the aura of the museum; the adjective “curatorial”
then becomes a more reflexive way to describe such
activity. As artist Rudi St. Darma, a Bandung artist who
helped found the artist collective Rumah Proses, puts it:
“To curate is not the exclusive privilege of curators”.
To explicate how contentious the term curator is, the
Independent Curators International, an organization
of curators, published Words of Wisdom: A Curator’s
Vade Mecum on Contemporary Art. Proceeding from
its inspiration of the medieval trade manual, the anthology
of perspectives from 60 curators all over the world
delineates the curatorial vocation in light of the “cult
of the curator” in contemporary art and thinks about
the difficulty in fixing the profession in the vise of a
guild, thus the paradox. According to Carin Kuoni in
the introduction:
From the sixty essays assembled here, two main
lessons might be drawn:
first, that no rules exist in the field of curatorial
work and, second, that curating an exhibition of
contemporary art only addresses issues of the
particular moment in which the exhibition was created.
To attempt however modestly and arbitrarily, to
present some of the important curatorial strategies
of the last twenty-five years—as we have done in
this book—runs counter to this ahistorical outlook.
(Kuoni: 2001, 11)
Represented in this compendium is the Thai curator
Apinan, who likens the curator to an acrobat, a chef, a
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows
go-between, and a dreamer. Apinan (1999) in another
essay ponders the predicament of figuring out what
exactly it is that the curators do, considering the volatile
sympathies to which they tend, and how the concept
survives the translation in discrepant cultural contexts.
According to him:
What do words “curate” or “curator” mean? How
do they translate in Chinese, Japanese, Korean or
Thai? Are we talking at the same wavelengths among
Asian curators? In some cases the curator’s job is the
keeper of treasures behind the scene. He or she keeps
records, looks after art objects or places art labels
and checks lighting and temperature control in the
galleries. Some work for artists and massage artistic
egos. Yet, there are those curators who straddle
many roles as cultural arbiters, cultural brokers,
dealers, taste setters, diplomats, art ambassadors
or at times take on the roles of the artists. In the
future, demand for Asian curators to shift between
these roles will be evident as contemporary Asian art
will be projected, interpreted and even manipulated
beyond the confines of what is known as the art word.
(unpublished)
Apinan wrote this passage in 1999, and today we
witness how Asian curators have traded on their statures
as interlocutors of contemporary art and, as he has
prefigured, have brought art to urgent social zones. The
intrication of the Asian curator within a more
encompassing socius could be explained as a relay of
responses to the various modalities of internationalization
in the seventies and eighties, be it in the form of
multiculturalism, capitalist integration, democratization,
export-driven economic policies, and migration. The
exhibition Magiciens de la Terre (1989) was a watershed
exhibition to the degree that it provoked questions
about a possible post-orientalist scenario in which the
“other” would be addressed with equivalence. The critique
of this initiation was staggering, clustering around the
point that mere accommodation predicated on
“representation” does not revise the relations of power;
in fact, it supplements its very basis and thus exasperates
the resistance to liberal affirmativity. The fallout of such
an effort haunts curators working beyond the Euramerican
pale to this day, prompting them to constantly disconfirm
the delusion of globalization as a mechanism of
symmetrical give-and-take.
Therefore, the emergence of the curators needs to be
historicized, its provenance traced and its itineraries
marked. It is with circumspection that we view it in relation
to the “large exhibition” that had required a re-location
of art space beyond the museum and simultaneously a