Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

co-location of art around the world as exemplified by
the Venice Biennale of nineteenth-century vintage, in
the vein of the international exposition zeitgeist. The
“global” synchronizes uneven modernities; they are
made to appear contemporaneous within a history of art
of modernist trajectories and self-fulfilling prophesies
of progress. Over time and under different climates, the
curator has been called various names: Ausstellungsmacher
(exhibition maker) in Germany, commissaire in France,
keeper and conservator in England. (Kuoni, 2001: 12)
Gleaned from the practice of curators, we can set up
a tentative typology of the tasks with which they are
entrusted and the repute they cultivate. To a significant
extent, therefore, it is practice that defines a mutating,
morphing energy called curation. In this regard, art
historian John Clark’s classification of the roles of
curators of contemporary Chinese art is valuable:
selector; thinker, mediator of thought; cohort provider,
talent scout, theatrical agent; journalist; market maker;
cultural provocateur, prototype designer, entrepreneur.
These curatorial mediations are not hermetically sealed
but porous, and on the ground, these overlap; in less
formalized art worlds, the movement back and
forth between roles is brisk and sometimes oblivious to
conflicts of interest and other ethical questions usually
policed by modern or western standards. From Clark’s
list, we can derive a template of the curatorial obligation
that comprises the following: valuation, advocacy,
coordination, articulation. The curator informs the
value of the artist and the art work in the context of
inclusion in exhibitions and related endeavors. The
curator advocates a discourse by writing about art and
artists, thereby promoting a particular style or thought,
through the dissemination of knowledge. The curator
assembles artists and art in a forum that guarantees
presence and confluence. The curator intervenes in making
the voice of the artists heard, of speaking on their behalf in
the global art world’s main language, which is English, or
serving as informant of foreign curators who roam the
world for prospective talent. It is because of this panoply
of licenses that the power of the curators, which may
develop into a monopoly, is resented by artists and other
art-world stakeholders.
Research into peculiar manifestations of curatorial
practice across varied environments aims to discern a
horizon of what may constitute the curatorial gesture
within historical over determinations. It also paves a
direction away from an exhibitionary regime in which
art is predestined to be put on view before acquisitive
spectators. The practice of exhibition may have served
as the nexus between the museum curator and the
independent curator, and as such may prove to be the
HERITAGE, IDENTITY, CHANGE AND CONFLICT
final vestige of modernism’s protracted denial of failure
that preempts the hopes of a liberative contemporary.
On the other hand, the persistence of the exhibition
in a post-modern or post-avant-garde locale may testify
to its regenerative criticality that motors contemporary
culture’s drift toward an eternal present bedeviled by
historical memory and future emancipation. It is thus
clear at the outset that there are contrapuntal ties between
curation and the contemporary, and that the two terms
inflect each other.
It is pertinent to qualify the term “independent” but only
to the degree that it is contrasted with the “institutional”.
Having said this, it is not helpful at all to drive a wedge
between the two. In Indonesia and Thailand, curators
move in and out of both independent and institutional
contexts; this movement carves a peculiar space within
which they practice curation and break through the
membranes of the art world.
Carrying out this particular research on curators meant
conducting a modest ethnography of art worlds in
Thailand and Indonesia, figuring out the social relationships
among artists, institutions, critics, and the public. This
ethnographic inquiry is complicated by the fact that the
state of contemporary art is rather fluid and, given the
uneven and asymmetrical modes by which modernity
had taken root in these art worlds, certain practices and
roles are practically makeshift, improvised and run on
idiosyncratic rationality; the rules in the field are rather
pliant, continuously modified by the practice of
curators whose very practice creates a system, which
had not existed before their sorties into this arena. For
instance, so-called alternative spaces that thrive today
may close tomorrow and people who profess as curators
are also artists, commentators, and sometimes art dealers.
Therefore, requisites of theory or ethics, sometimes
idealized as universal imperatives, can be appraised only
within the habitus of the social world of art in Indonesia
and Thailand.
HISTORY
In contemplating the history of contemporary art in
Southeast Asia, specifically in Thailand and Indonesia,
it is useful to draw up a synchronic matrix in which
the dynamic interaction between local efforts and
international programs can be grasped. By the latter we
mean the exhibitions coordinated by foreign institutions
focused on Asia or Southeast Asia. We are afforded an
overview of the pivotal events and practices, turning
or flash points in the history of curation in Indonesia
and Thailand as well as the ventures in the Asia-Pacific
region in the formation of contemporary art in this
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows
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