the image of a superstar

In search of the Superstar Curator

Curatorial Experiment

I find myself as a newly formed artistic writing curator interested in the fairly virginal (uncorrupted) concept of the ‘superstar curator’ and would very much like to be one. In this search to find or in my endeavour to become one I am investigating what it means to be a curator and the increasing notion of curating as art practice.

Clive Gilman – Cultural Currency

Culture V’s Art

Culture happens without aspiring to the status of Art. It is incidental.

Art is a subset of the broad concept of culture. It is deliberate.

Art is culturally specific therefore it is not exclusive and subject to change. However pockets of culturally inscribed spaces foster art as its property, carving out the degrees of ownership. ‘ART’ has a language, but today it is dominated by the language of contemporary art practice. Via the power of the spiraling peer consensus this language has become our belief system, our doctrine, our formula.

Jim Buckley & Clive Gilman – Public Art 05/03/09

‘ Major development proposals have now been approved for the Trencherfiled Mill area, within Wigan Pier Quarter. Public art is expected to form a significant feature of the development and will enhance the regeneration of the area’.

Taken from a call to artists interested in a major regeneration scheme within the Wigan Pier area, 2005. This is a direct quote from the ‘expressions of interest’ document issued at the time.

François Matarasso – Power, responsibility and the artist

François Matarasso presented a paper that looked at the position of the artist in democratic society and stated that artists are just artists through the acts they under take and not due to their innate character or their education. His position was that being an artist was a role, something they do and not something they are, its not connected to a condition or should not be attached to statues. Believing this notion an artist is therefore involved in the exercise of power and this carries responsibilities.

Life is Over! If you want it – exhibition review

Life is Over! If you want it
Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design
24 January – 14 February 2009

Desks, decay and post-it notes – Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen

Their relationship started as an interrupted engagement that eventually discovered common and shared issues – this exhibition however, many years later, is a fully immersive engagement. They are comfortable; this is their patch, their current nerve centre. Exhibiting within their place of work (Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design) to their peers and their colleagues clearly gives them a different perspective. They are doing it for real. Airports, trains and compromise no longer punctuate it. 

Interviewing as a practice (excercise) – 05/02/09

Interview between Fraser Reid, Donna Holford-Lovell and Debby Telatovich: 26/02/09 (edited)

FR: Why are you creative?

DHL: Don’t know,… why are YOU creative? Why do you THINK I’m creative? Why is ANYONE creative? Why do I create? I don’t like that question.

FR: Okay then. What is your practice?

DHL: Curating. What is that? Initiate interactions between art, artists, and audiences. I read my notebook recently from (about) 6  years ago that a curator (creator) is a ‘cultural (aggravator – I should have said agitator, showing you have to be careful what you are talking about) agitator *’. (Aggravates) culture! Not in a negative way, I didn’t see it as negative … (shaking book) not prodding and not annoying…

In conversation with Olav Henriksen

The Norwegian writer and curator Olav Henriksen told me that appropriation is inevitable but none the less worthy. All things are appropriable. He liked my attack vector but he could see several areas I needed to negotiate, which (he saw) where problematic and which could defeat my best intentions.

Wikipedia Art – the fear of unpredictability

On Valentine’s Day 2009, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern launched the Wikipedia art page, which resonated with the history of media art, authorship, and media formalism on many levels. Has this particular piece updated Beuys’ admonition of the openness of art? Not only that, does art based on open Web 2.0 standards like the Wiki define art that is a palimpsest by definition? What is interesting yet disturbing about this is not only the obliteration of discrete authorship, but the total indeterminacy of intellectual ownership whatsoever.