Changing Roles

“Everything we might say about an artwork that is not neutral description of aesthetic properties is an attribution of content.” (McEvilley 1993:70)

Traditionally “the curator functioned as a keeper, or a custodian, personally responsible for the acquisition, classification and safeguarding of objects that formed the museum’s collection” (Bank 2008). At the same time “the artist had as function to produce a work of art. However in this century is more and more common to see the artist embracing never ending functions, not only regarding its work of art but also the search for presenting it, the publicity of the exhibition. In many cases, these shifts have lead to a blurring of the boundaries between the artist and the curator, and the evolution of a hybrid practice, the ‘artist/curator’” (Bank 2008). 

In this performance as a curator I wished not only to step out of my author-self but also to demonstrate the accumulation of functions that a performer normally has. The "fashion design rich"     curator that has a small gallery and chooses the "kind and generous" artist (dressing just a white t-shirt and jeans) to exhibit there, for free, with the only justification that the artist makes small scale works.  

“It cannot succeed. If one was to find a place, and perhaps there are some, where liberty is effectively exercised, one would find that this is not owing to the order of objects, but, once again, owing to the practice of liberty. Which is not to say that, after all, one may as well leave people in slums, thinking that they can simply exercise their rights there.”(Foucault and Rabinow 1991:246)

It was an attempt of raise questions around the problematic of What is an author of Foucault in which the critic have the function of “try to give this intelligible being a realistic status, by discerning, in the individual, a “deep” motive, a “creative” power, or a “design”.(…)”(Foucault and Rabinow 1991:110) and at the same time the importance of the author, the work and the critic/curator; where is situated our place of comfort? How do we create these places?

By assuming the role of the curator I was able to present my work, to create a place where in fact ‘it’ existed and at the same time since there was a character in the first part of the presentation, whose functions were to guide the public to the video-installation, distribute the postcard-maps and mark with tape the places where the public was situated, the relation between viewer and object viewed (Kaye 2000:84) became established enabling the proximity to the artist work in the second part of the performance.

Opening the doors to my places of comfort, sharing the verticality of the body and the space of the viewers while crossing the studio side-by-side, blurring the roles curator/artist/viewer in a parallelism with spaces/places/mediums “Throughout his work, Klein sought to transcend or annihilate representation itself, which is always about what is absent, for an art of immediacy and of presences, even if it was the presence of the immaterial, the void.”(Solnit 2006:169)