Publications

Curated space artists’ interviews in full.

Introduction

For the DJ as curator – name three headphone tracks for a slow, downhill, cliff-side skateboard cruise?

1) Lee ‘Scratch' Perry – Blackboard Jungle Dub
2) Pete Rock & C L Smooth – The Creator
3) Sonic Youth – Goo

Response by Paul D Miller AKA DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid from blog de jeanpoole: www.octapod.org/jeanpoole/archives/000982.html Jan 2005.

The verb ‘to curate' has been liberated from the confines of the museum collection into everyday usage. The DJ curates, the iPod owner curates, my selection of artists and the edited responses that made it into the pages of this publication can, arguably, be called a curation. There is nothing strange about the artist-curator hybrid. Artists have been doing it for a long time in all kinds of spaces, and are still curating today in all kinds of contexts, as the examples in this supplement and on the a-n website illustrate. It is liberating to know that the curator is no longer the hallowed keeper of collections, no longer the custodian or guardian of art. Yet it is essential to have a degree in art history and desirable to have a postgraduate qualification in museum, gallery or curatorial studies if you want a £19k a year job as an Assistant Curator at The Tate Modern. The custodians are still out there, and having your work curated in this kind of context bestows a different kind of validation from the derelict house or the mortgaged property in Tottenham, North London.

I like DJ Spooky's response. The blogger's question has set the context or space by which the work should be experienced (a downhill cliff-side) by the audience-participant. The tempo or atmosphere has been suggested (slow), the method for experiencing the work has been established (on headphones) and the artist-curator has selected three works in response to this site.

The contributions here suggest that there is a dialectic going on between external/institutional forces and artists' work. There is also relative autonomy from institutional and commercial muscle – the hundreds of vibrant, maverick, young and off-the-wall spaces passionately run by artists/curators are testament to this – but bureaucracy can stifle. Crucially, there is a strategic penetration of the institutions by artists and progressive curators to present works that provoke, inspire and cut across art-form disciplines. As Jananne Al-Ani points out: “[the larger public galleries and museums] can offer a much more accessible platform for the consumption of contemporary art by the general public.”

However, in the main, what is missing from the big spaces is the contact with the artist, the maker and it is this encounter that allows for debate, dialogue, argument and differences to be expressed:

“There is nothing like a direct one-to-one unmediated discussion between members of the public and an artist. Our artists are on the frontline... there are no interpretation assistants, no resource centres.” Louise Short

Critical rigour or indulgence? They exist on both sides of the fence, we need more of both and a dialogue needs to occur between the two.

Manick Govinda manages the Artists’ Advisory service at Artsadmin. Producer, facilitator for artists’ projects, talent scout for NESTA’s Creative Pioneers Programme and commissioning editor for a-n. Project manager for the decibel Investment in Artists and Curators programme.
www.artsadmin.co.uk
www.nesta.org.uk/theacademy/home.html

Jananne Al-Ani

The artist-curator is a strange hybrid of selecting and positioning your work and other artists’ work in unusual conceptual and contextual situations. How do you tackle this in your thinking, practice and selection process? And what, in your opinion, is the role/purpose of the artist-curator in the 21st Century?

Artists’ working lives are fundamentally hybrid whether they are doing paid, unpaid or voluntary work or making their own work in the studio, selling through a commercial gallery or in receipt of public funding in one form or another. Organising shows (or ‘curating’) is just one of the many activities artists engage in. This is nothing new and there is no reason to assume that it is in any way a radical or ‘unusual’ practice simply because artists are involved.

Those of us working in the art world, either as artists, ‘artist-curators’ or full-time curators generally assume that the work we are doing is innovative, ground breaking and original when in reality we are all functioning within a long established field which has complex and highly codified modes of operation and which is often essentially conservative. I don’t believe the role of the artist-curator in the 21st century will be any different to that in the 20th century.

The curatorial work I have been involved in has been a mixture of working with publicly funded organisations or on a freelance basis (although these two modes of operating are not mutually exclusive). My independent curatorial work has often developed out of collaborations with other artists, either because we have had issues and ideas about work in common or we have enjoyed each other’s work.

Personally, I was first motivated to organise exhibitions as a way of gaining some control over the context in which my work was being presented. In art as in life it seems we are defined and define others by our ‘difference’, whatever form that might take, be it racial, sexual, cultural, etc. Even before September 11 I had been approached by a small but significant number of curators looking for an ‘Arab’ artist, a ‘Muslim’ artist or one from the Middle East. During the late 90s I was making video works based on childrens’ word games so I decided to organise a show that included works by artists concerned in some way with games and play. The artists’ origins were not relevant to their selection.

In contrast, the exhibition ‘Veil’ dealt with a sign, which as curators, we felt had been reduced and condensed to such an extreme extent in the West. We wanted to open up and broaden the debate around the image and symbolism of the veil though the work of contemporary artists who might not otherwise be shown along side each other. Again, our choice of artists was driven not by their place of birth or whether they came from veiling cultures but by the work itself.

How does your approach differ from the monographic and group exhibitions of ‘professional’ curators of galleries or museums?

The question posed implies that all gallery and museums curators operate in some homogeneous and standardised way. My experience as an exhibiting artist has taught me that no two individuals or institutions function alike. The majority of curators I have worked with have been inspired, hard working professionals. However, the institutional structures they work with can often be artist and indeed curator ‘unfriendly’. Many of the larger public galleries and museums are slow moving bureaucracies with visitor numbers, retail outlets, cafes and restaurants to worry about never mind finding cash in the budget to commission and produce new work and publications for exhibitions. On the other hand they can offer a much more accessible platform for the consumption of contemporary art by the general public.

When organising exhibitions I have always tried, where possible, to provide what I personally desire when working towards the production of an exhibition, namely, that the curator be clear about what he/she is offering. For example, it is good to know in advance what the curatorial premise of a show is, who the other artists under consideration are and where it will take place. Finances are another vital area to be clear about: what the fee for participation is, what the production budget is, what educational programs are being run to coincide with the show and whether there are any teaching or lecturing opportunities available. If there is a publication being produced or an essay commissioned, is there an opportunity for the artist to read, comment on and perhaps discuss issues further with the writer. Most importantly, there should be adequate time for all the necessary work to be undertaken in preparation for the show. All these are common sense pointers for a respectful way of working but it is surprising how easily they can be neglected.

Do you feel that the choices you make in your practice and in curating other artists/work are driven by external forces such as funding criteria, social agendas, audience development? And is this an impediment to artistic creativity?

Absolutely not in relation to the research and development part of the curatorial process. However, these are issues that have been addressed by organisations I have collaborated with in order to fund curatorial projects once the ‘creative’ phase is over.

For example, I worked as an independent curator on ‘Veil’ but the bulk of the funding to realise the exhibition came from an inIVA application to the Arts Council of England National Touring Programme (NTP) budget (it toured to four publicly funded galleries in England). Funding applications should be judged on their merits and not decided through policy and politics. However, I do believe that where public monies are spent it is vital that the organisations involved be accountable.

Self-indulgence or critical rigour? Without the interpretative or validating role of a gallery or museum curator how do you measure quality of work and the works’ ability to communicate to an audience?

There is a wide range and variety of experience amongst those who hold curatorial positions in major museums and art galleries, not to mention freelancers, as a result of the shift in the professional world of curating in recent years. Where once museum studies and art history graduates worked through the apprenticeship model of starting in the most junior position and moving up through the ranks, now arts administration or ‘curating’ courses are producing graduates who are moving straight into more senior ranks of the art establishment. One thing they have in common however is that a fair proportion of them are often practice-based fine art undergraduates and like artist-curators, they have experienced both sides of the equation.

Most artists with a long history of exhibiting will have built up a wealth of experience that feeds into any curatorial projects they undertake. The unique and potentially dangerous pitfall facing artist-curators is the opportunity to include their own work in the exhibitions and events they are organising and it is here that the potential for self-indulgence looms large.

Jananne Al-Ani, artist. As curatorial assistant at Autograph, worked on exhibitions and publications, including Jimmy Robert’s show ‘Brown Leatherette’, Platform, London and the monograph The Best of Janette Parris. Co-curated ‘Veil’ at The New Art Gallery Walsall touring to the Bluecoat Arts Centre and Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool; Modern Art Oxford and Kulturhuset Stockholm (2003/4) and ‘Fair Play’ at Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London touring to Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham (2001/2).

David A Bailey

The artist-curator is a strange hybrid of selecting and positioning your work and other artists’ work in unusual conceptual and contextual situations. How do you tackle this in your thinking, practice and selection process? And what, in your opinion, is the role/purpose of the artist-curator in the 21st Century?

The artist-curator is not a strange hybrid. In fact I would argue that it has been and is an essential part to understanding art and contemporary culture over the last fifty years. I would even go further to say that it was a key genre of practice which emerged after the post-war period and reached its peak in the 1970s and 1980s. What we are seeing today is the formalisation of this genre particularly in the way that artists in this country are invited by gallery and funding institutions to be key advisers and vanguards to a number of projects ranging from the Royal Academy to the Southbank Meltdown projects. In the 1970s and 1980s it was a different experience for black artists, where in order to survive and be seen we had to be our own archivists, art historians, curators and art administrators. The work of Eddie Chambers, Lubania Himid and Rasheed Aareen are examples of this practice which has a very distinct history in Britain during this period.

My work as an artist-curator has really been focused around three key stages: the first being the artist-curator working with a number of artists to co-curate projects. The DMAX photography collective of the 1980s is an example of this, where a number of black photographers came together to curate their own work in collaboration.

The next phase of my artist-curator work has to be the 1990s where I was very concerned about working on a conceptual level which meant working with intellectual ideas such as the ‘Mirage’ exhibition at the ICA in London. I am now in the third stage which is bringing together issue-based work and ideas to a mass audience and collaborating with artists and art historians to make this happen. An example of this is the exhibition ‘Veil’ which toured England from 2003-04 and was a co-curatorial collaboration between myself two artists and an art historian-curator.

How does your approach differ from the monographic and group exhibitions of ‘professional’ curators of galleries or museums?

A lot of my work is about taking on the canon of art history but also fusing this canon with elements of popular culture. For instance my two big historical shows the ‘Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s’ at the Hayward Gallery in 1997 and the recent show ‘Back To Black’ about the 1960s and 1970s argues that there are key moments in the twentieth century where black people were the objects and subjects of significant change within artistic culture which not only challenged the existing artistic norms but also developed them. Now these exhibitions were unique in that they were not done independently from the institution but were cultivated within a conceptual institutional environment.

Do you feel that the choices you make in your practice and in curating other artists/work are driven by external forces such as funding criteria, social agendas, audience development? And is this an impediment to artistic creativity?

Of course my work is steered towards funding opportunities but I have to say that my work is also centered on a social agenda which is black subjectivity. It is important for people to understand that I come from a particular generation of artists, writers, critics, performers, filmmakers, policymakers, social activists, community workers, educationalists, filmmakers, technologists, who grew up in the 1970s and began to practice in the 1980s where black subjectivity was central to our lives and daily experiences. My photographic work in the 1980s was all about that moment and now my curatorial work, which really began with ‘Mirage’, looks at the legacy of the ideas of Frantz Fanon right up until now with my work on helping to secure a public memorial to Ken Saro-Wiwa is about that social agenda that I grew up with.

Self-indulgence or critical rigour? Without the interpretative or validating role of a gallery or museum curator how do you measure quality of work and the works’ ability to communicate to an audience?

For me there are only a few ways to measure elements of quality and effect of ones work and that is through legacy and influences. I take pride in knowing that my work has influenced people such as Isaac Julien and Steve McQueen to develop further in the practice of visual art/film installation. I also take pride in knowing that the education events from the ‘Harlem Renaissance’ exhibition made educationalists think differently about using historical works to reach a younger audience. And I also take pride in knowing that young people who have never been to a gallery before came to see my projects and were inspired by them.

David A Bailey, photographer, writer, curator and lecturer. Work focuses on issues relating to black representations in the area of photography. Involved in setting up Autograph: The Association of Black Photographers in 1988 and the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) in 1994. Currently an associate curator at inIVA.

Anne Bean

The artist-curator is a strange hybrid of selecting and positioning your work and other artists’ work in unusual conceptual and contextual situations. How do you tackle this in your thinking, practice and selection process? And what, in your opinion, is the role/purpose of the artist-curator in the 21st Century?

Curator, until recently, was considered a very separate term to artist. Artists would put on shows, events, run clubs, etc but it was always considered part of an art activity. As with all organic spontaneous, open-door happenings this was claimed, sterilised and institutionalised, with long lists of dos and dont’s, both overt and hidden. At Reading University from 1969-73 I instigated many collaborative shows, for instance, starting with a completely blacked out space, I asked everyone to bring a mirror and a candle to place somewhere, thus making a completely shared installation. In Butlers Wharf 1975-79, I organised many events including evenings with Michael Nyman trio, Stephen Cripps’ kinetic machinery and pyrotechnics, Paul Burwell, Richard Wilson and myself exploring sounds in the river under Tower Bridge, Psychic TV, early Sex Pistols, Jayne County and many international artists including a magnificent piece by Johan Lorbeer and Reiner Bergman who contact-miked all the cooking procedures involved in producing an incredible banquet. In 1981 I tried several galleries, to no avail, to give Paul McCarthy a show. We then took over a derelict house and put him on with Paul Burwell, and myself, ‘2 Ps and a Bean’. These were just a very few of many such events, unfunded, word of mouth and attended by hundreds of people.

How does your approach differ from the monographic and group exhibitions of ‘professional’ curators of galleries or museums?

Currently, David Medalla and Adam Nankervis have brilliantly claimed the nomenclature ‘London Biennale’ thus utterly subverting the professional curator at their own game. Through sheer passion, commitment and empathy they have enabled thousands of shows and events of the most extraordinary work to come together; the overall umbrella being the most profound work of all. David’s solo show at the ICA in September 2005 included many self-selecting people, untroubled by any application procedures. Similarly, such spaces as Area 10 in Peckham, Speakers Palace in Hackney, Kingston Rowing Club in Hull still have an open policy where astonishing, straight-from-the-soul work has occurred continuing some of the spirit of spaces such as London Musicians Collective, London Film-Makers Co-op and X6 Butlers Wharf. In far too many ‘professionally’ curated shows one sees the heavy fingerprints of the ticked boxes, which although treated with a degree of irony, are actually strangling many of the most brave and innovative gallerists.

Do you feel that the choices you make in your practice and in curating other artists/work are driven by external forces such as funding criteria, social agendas, audience development? And is this an impediment to artistic creativity?

Many artists knowingly juggle the criteria they must fulfil to receive funding, alongside the core values of their work. Whereby, some of the rigour this imposes can help to shape and hone work, it is frightening how often this becomes seen as intrinsically and inextricably part of the work. The proliferation of pseudo-social work is part of this phenomenon, both because of the push towards popularisation of art and through the materialist dialectic, artists feel they cannot trust their own state of being and, like orgone thieves, feed off the so-called ‘public’. I am incredibly aware in a present and funded project ‘Reap’, a year-long work in which I invited sixteen artists to take part, of my own discomfort with seeing myself as artist-curator. I think this is partly because the term suggests intrusion, moulding and some degree of preservation, all of which feel alien. The actual biggest impediment to ‘artistic creativity’ is the sheer weight of bureaucracy, which, mostly and very fortunately at the moment, ArtsAdmin are shouldering.

Do you feel that the choices you make in your practice and in curating other artists/work are driven by external forces such as funding criteria, social agendas, audience development? And is this an impediment to artistic creativity?

The absurd and patronising assumption of the need for interpretation and validation through an institutional curator puts me in mind of the original meaning of curate, through Latin and then Anglo-French still resonating:

One appointed as guardian of affairs of a person legally unfit to conduct themself.

One who has the care of souls.

Indulgent is to be generous and tolerant. The term self-indulgent is used so dismissively that artists are frightened to go within sniffing distance and often, regurgitating theory is mistaken for critical rigour. I don’t see these two terms – self-indulgence and critical rigour – in opposition. In talking to younger artists I often sense some tremendous relief in being given ‘permission’ to try out some ‘quirky’ action which they are afraid would be read as self-indulgent and thus lacking validity. This often becomes a very important initial exploration for a profound piece of work and reinforces primary trust in oneself.

Anne Bean, installation and performance artist. Work encompasses a range of media including sculpture, projections, drawing, photography, video and sound, using a range materials from fire and pyrotechnics to weather balloons and wind. Currently curating ‘Reap’, a year-long investigation for the Café Gallery, London.

The Centre of Attention

The artist-curator is a strange hybrid of selecting and positioning your work and other artists’ work in unusual conceptual and contextual situations. How do you tackle this in your thinking, practice and selection process? And what, in your opinion, is the role/purpose of the artist-curator in the 21st Century?

There is nothing strange about the artist-curator: it is not a new concept but a sign that the artist is engaged in what happens around them. The artist-curator does not per se produce unusual situations. In any case we don’t consider ourselves artist-curators. We consider the Centre of Attention’s work to be participatory curating. We are very much involved in the choice, commissioning, presentation of the work and drawing attention to the performative aspects of all these processes...

An example would be, in Paris, January 2005: ‘Nicolas Schöffer – a found exhibition’ presents the real unmediated space of the artist’s studio, where we, as curators, limit ourselves to defining it as the exhibition, drawing people through the terrain of art and visual culture to the site as un-fabricated, as an endeavour and as a site of contestation... A process very much opposed to the curator’s fabrications of facsimile exhibitions.

‘Gonzo’ curation is about taking risks and we put ourselves very much in the firing line. We stand by our choices and hope something is revealed about us, as human beings, and our curating methods... we are performing curation.

For example, in ‘On Demand’ (London, August-September 2005), participants were asked to select the artist’s work they wanted to see and then we brought it to their homes.

As gonzo curators we do not go forth hiding behind the artists.

Variety in the art world landscape is what we desire. There are no rules. We need more unique, original, hot curators from all backgrounds, and with all sorts of ideas. This will keep the scene a little less earnest, less parsimonious, less didactic, less closed and conformist. We need more courage, creativity and confidence...

Framing possibilities and celebrating individualism and freedom from orthodoxy are challenges that keep us inspired, entertained, interested and alert... We want to re-evaluate the past, discover new trends and give oxygen to the significant but over-looked for whatever reason (for example, our curation of Ken Friedman’s Fluxus concert, April 2004, London).

Artists are fracturing into tribes but these tribes are not necessarily original or innovative and can be defensive and retrograde (nostalgic). In a Matthew Arnold sense, we want the best that each tribe has to offer.

The Centre of Attention is a search engine for fresh, original, vital, beautiful, true, intelligent and amusing, tragic and comedic work. Sometimes literally: In ‘the Centre of Attention Search Engine‘ (San Francisco, March-April 2003) the exhibition launched with an empty gallery space, with artists bringing in work to be discussed with us before being accepted or rejected for the show, and the curators scouring the city with a view to finding the most interesting work. The show was a performance where visitors could see the making of the exhibition; they could come back daily to check the progress; could follow the curator’s visits, make suggestions. The end of the show paradoxically marked the completion of the process.

In the 21st century we are merely the performing monkey to the organ-grinding of the artists.

How does your approach differ from the monographic and group exhibitions of ‘professional’ curators of galleries or museums?

Do you feel that the choices you make in your practice and in curating other artists/work are driven by external forces such as funding criteria, social agendas, audience development? And is this an impediment to artistic creativity?

On one level the Centre of Attention’s approach doesn’t differ from professional (as in ‘salaried’) curators of galleries or museums. Like the institutions, we produce solo and group shows, some of which travel internationally. Like them we produce a magazine, administer a prize, hold events and screenings, and try to define and label current trends in contemporary art. Unlike them, we have never been state-sponsored and do not depend on (though would not reject) the welfare funding given to artists, curators, artist-curators and institutions and we are not as driven by external forces such as funding criteria, social agendas, audience development or market forces, as they are. We have no budget, no academic, political or moral agenda; we have no time and no will to over self-justify.

But we emulate the institution and thereby generate a surreal expectation shortfall. What can you do without money, space and resources seen as indispensable to the big space? Can the pageant of art history and its inexorable forward movement be deformed by an individual artist or curator?

Should only wealth accruing sections of society dictate what is the most interesting in art production and endeavour?

The traditional alternative space or artist-led exhibition can be equally unappealing to us with its inbuilt flaw of compromise, its naïve idealism and its conventionally avant-garde antechamber function. We want to maintain a quality control and are not keen to reward commitment, integrity or delusion for its own sake.

The Centre of Attention has no desire to be literal, didactic or provide examples for our limited political beliefs or narrow social agendas.

As gonzo curators we often fall back on asking ourselves these questions and discussing with those willing to listen: Do we want it? Do we want to be part of it? What do I think about it and that? What do I feel about that and it? And why do I think and feel that and it about it and that? And why hasn’t it, that, that and it, been done before or since; and if it has and was, why is it different now or not?

Self-indulgence or critical rigour? Without the interpretative or validating role of a gallery or museum curator how do you measure quality of work and the works' ability to communicate to an audience?

Critical rigour is a minority self indulgence... and as such we celebrate it!

We do not interpret and we do not validate.

Interpret? That’s for the future but have a go by all means.

Validate? We can do without it and take our chance. Museums confer status not validation. This supposed validating quality is not upheld by their past track record.

Communicate? It is a big assumption that the work should communicate anything.

We create the exhibition and let it un-spool as it will, creating its own audience.

To predict the future you must change the past and thus we participate, through our enquiry into the phenomenon of art production, presentation, consumption and heritage-ization.

The Centre of Attention is curated by Pierre Coinde and Gary O’Dwyer. The Centre’s experimental approach stems from an ongoing enquiry into the phenomenon of art production, presentation, consumption and heritage-isation.
www.thecentreofattention.org

Shezad Dawood

The artist-curator is a strange hybrid of selecting and positioning your work and other artists’ work in unusual conceptual and contextual situations. How do you tackle this in your thinking, practice and selection process? And what, in your opinion, is the role/purpose of the artist-curator in the 21st Century?

For me it’s got to be an extension of my practice. It’s as simple as that, which is why I think such petty foibles as not putting yourself in your own shows become irrelevant and dishonest – unless you are looking for a parallel career, which I am not. I don’t think you can be serious as an artist, and operate as a separate, objective curator. I think the hybrid position of artist-curator becomes interesting to follow a line of inquiry and tease out the interplay between one’s own work and that of others.

For example ‘ We Have Met the Enemy & He Is Us’, which I curated at Redux, in February of this year, was looking at the still muddied area of the ‘well-intentioned’ cultural group show. ie let’s stick a bunch of artists of a specific race, religion or subject matter together because it seems like a good idea. In this case I decided to take this to its logical conclusion and mirror current political dynamics of Us and Them, by only including artists who happen to have Islamic names. What also interested me was to play with peoples’ prejudicial expectations of the show, by putting together a fairly didactic press release, but then making the show an altogether more playful open-ended exercise – looking at the whole idea of the site of the exhibition as the site of an event. In this way none of the works were labelled, and thus became a series of positions that overlapped in a scenario that was as much nightclub as gallery.

How does your approach differ from the monographic and group exhibitions of ‘professional’ curators of galleries or museums?

Those are so well-covered by highly trained individuals, that it would be foolish to try and go down that route – although saying that, perhaps it might be interesting to turn the whole monographic show on its head, with a variety of conflicting positions, to show a less tidied up vision of artistic practice. And in a way the ‘Paradise Row’ exhibition (where I invited Chris Hammond of MOT to subvert my back catalogue of work in terms of a house that I had built and designed with architect Tughela Gino) was doing something like that, although perhaps it could go further...

Getting back to the original question, my approach is not necessarily that different, it just operates on a very different timescale. I can ask questions/posit a line of enquiry and then manifest it within a few years, whereas larger institutions might take twenty or thirty years to follow the same process. It’s a question of scale, within which everyone plays their part, and I’d say that it is this time factor which causes a lot of the tensions between what artists are actually doing, and what is being represented by institutions. But actually I don’t see it as a problem, because things need to exist in their proper place and time.

Do you feel that the choices you make in your practice and in curating other artists/work are driven by external forces such as funding criteria, social agendas, audience development? And is this an impediment to artistic creativity?

Definitely not funding criteria, otherwise you’re one small step away from being a civil servant. The choices I make in terms of my own practice and within my projects as artist-curator are driven by a constantly shifting inquiry into what one might call a ‘politics of culture’. I see this as embracing: history, fiction, appropriation and authenticity, and of course social agendas and a relationship to audience plays a part in this. Generally I have a number of ideas in my head at any given time, and circumstance and the availability of funding will determine how and when they take place, but not the choice of ideas. A certain element of randomness is also key to keeping an enquiry open and mapping it out in the real world.

Self-indulgence or critical rigour? Without the interpretative or validating role of a gallery or museum curator how do you measure quality of work and the works' ability to communicate to an audience?

Well I think there is never one single take on value. One of the keys to the way I work is to constantly play with this ‘sign of value’, and where it might be attributed. Hence having done the ‘We Have Met the Enemy...’ show earlier this year, my next project as artist-curator is next April/May at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, and is entitled ‘High Risk Painting’. You couldn’t imagine a show more superficially removed from the previous one. The show looks at the legacy of painting as a performative act, and how with the whole ‘Triumph of Painting’ this whole vital line of inquiry has been somehow muted. The show will feature a performance where a suite of paintings is literally taken off the wall and used to illustrate a lecture (Emily Wardill). A fictionalised dialogue between two artists in the creation of their works, piped in at set times of day through the gallery’s PA system – while the artists’ paintings lie piled up against the gallery wall (Chris Aldgate & Lee Johnson), and a documentary recording the artist’s trip to India to make work (Jorg Banerjee).

And does the new bureaucracy imposed on public galleries with regards to audiences and education always get to the heart of the matter? In fact the culture of ticking boxes provides space for artists to have a more direct relationship with their audiences. I’ve done things like pose as a TV crew with an assistant, and interview people as to their responses to a show – perhaps a touch of guerrilla tactics?

Shezad Dawood, artist, London. Practice involves subverting systems of value and culture, through notions of authorship, authenticity and collaboration. Contexts include cinema, architecture and theatre, and curatorial practice. Exhibitions at Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery and South London Gallery, as well as in public and institutional projects in Australia, Austria, Germany, India, Pakistan and Singapore.

Jeremy Deller

The artist-curator is a strange hybrid of selecting and positioning your work and other artists1 work in unusual conceptual and contextual situations. How do you tackle this in your thinking, practice and selection process? And what, in your opinion, is the role/purpose of the artist-curator in the 21st Century?

I don’t think it is strange at all, it’s just something that happens naturally. There seem to be a lot of artist/writers/critics/broadcasters around and no-one seems to mind. I don’t really think that hard about what I am doing – the role of the artist-curator is something for others to mull over.

How does your approach differ from the monographic and group exhibitions of ‘professional’ curators of galleries or museums?

There is not a single approach taken by these professionals; each person and institution is different so you can’t compare.

Do you feel that the choices you make in your practice and in curating other artists/work are driven by external forces such as funding criteria, social agendas, audience development? And is this an impediment to artistic creativity?

No. Yes it can be.

Self-indulgence or critical rigour? Without the interpretative or validating role of a gallery or museum curator how do you measure quality of work and the works’ ability to communicate to an audience?

I don’t like to measure things.

Jeremy Deller, acts as curator, producer or director of a broad range of projects, including orchestrated events, films and publications, which draw attention to forms of culture on the fringes of the mainstream or reveal hidden histories. Current projects include Folk Archive organised in collaboration with Alan Kane.

Rachel Garfield

The artist-curator is a strange hybrid of selecting and positioning your work and other artists’ work in unusual conceptual and contextual situations. How do you tackle this in your thinking, practice and selection process? And what, in your opinion, is the role/purpose of the artist-curator in the 21st Century?

I would not like to assume a definitive role for the artist/curator. As an artist I curate either to explore relationships to my own art or to explore ideas that are ignored by more mainstream channels. My curatorial practice as artist/curators, therefore, is centred around a critique of the dominant models

For example: My last show ‘Radical & Modest: Work, Leisure and the Everyday’ explored notions of marginality with regards to artists who have left a legacy to future generations of artists. All the artists in the show have shifted in and out of marginality depending on context. Drawing from the Ben Uri Gallery’s collection the exhibition brought together artists who have been marginalized within dominant contemporary discourses of art, such as David Bomberg and Joseph Herman into the heart of modernity. I did this through exhibiting works that highlight their engagement with modernity also and by putting them into dialogue with contemporary artists who are central to some readings of art history, such as Sonia Boyce, Art & Language, Steve Dwoskin, but who nevertheless also inhabit a position of marginality.

My next exhibition will be exploring current tropes of assumptions around Jewish identity and American cultural hegemony.

How does your approach differ from the monographic and group exhibitions of ‘professional’ curators of galleries or museums?

Being implicated in the curatorial ideas that I pursue (I don’t normally exhibit in shows curated by me) shapes my attitude to the exhibition and the ideas within it. My approach is not driven by external forces such as funding criteria, or audience development. I am not aiming for a career as an institutional curator, so I can take more chances without concern for institutional politicking, arguably. I also have a different relationship with other artists by being an artist myself.

Do you feel that the choices you make in your practice and in curating other artists/work are driven by external forces such as funding criteria, social agendas, audience development? And is this an impediment to artistic creativity?

My work is not driven by the above forces but, like most others, subject to them. For example, if I don’t get funding or venues then that can change the scale of the exhibition. Any output of an artist is constitutive of the external forces that provide the parameters, whether it’s the price of studios, the cost of living, being at art college, the equipment one owns etc etc – there is no such thing as unfettered creativity in any event.

Self-indulgence or critical rigour? Without the interpretative or validating role of a gallery or museum curator how do you measure quality of work and the works’ ability to communicate to an audience?

Having institutional validation is not necessarily a guarantee of critical rigour or against self-indulgence in itself. Many a self-indulgent exhibition gets institutional support. If the exhibition curated by the artist/curator is funded by arts council or whoever then it has institutional quality control anyway, of the funding body or at least validation from them. If not then it doesn’t matter as no public funds are implicated and people can do what they like. Both good and bad often sinks without trace. There are also other conduits for validation such as art journalists, other artists and so forth.

Rachel Garfield, artist and writer of critical texts. Work explores the lived experiences of identity, primarily using video. Has contributed texts to Third Text and The Jewish Quarterly. Curated ‘Radical & Modest: Work, Leisure and the Everyday’ at the Ben Uri Museum and is currently working on a new project entitled ‘Special Relationships’.

Anthony Howell

The artist-curator is a strange hybrid of selecting and positioning your work and other artists’ work in unusual conceptual and contextual situations. How do you tackle this in your thinking, practice and selection process? And what, in your opinion, is the role/purpose of the artist-curator in the 21st Century?

The issue for me has been that I have always been interested in creative activity outside my own specific field. I’m interested in artists working in my own field too, but a remark by Marcel Duchamp has always struck a chord. Very crudely paraphrased, his view was that he didn’t see how a painter stood to gain much from being influenced by another painter, since the initial painter would have resolved most of the issues that his or her work tackled, leaving the follower with little to do, and it was for this reason that he was more interested in the work of the author Raymond Roussel than in the work of any painter, since it seemed very productive to consider how one might translate the ideas of an author into visual concepts. I’ve experienced a related perception, which is that I’ve often wondered: if I were a composer, what sort of a composer I would be; if I were a sculptor, what sort of a sculptor I would be, and so on.

This idea took hold, initially, when I was training at the Royal Ballet School. I had taken up ballet because I was very keen on gymnastics at school, and very keen on all the arts. I thought ballet might offer a combination of physical training and creativity. However, the ballet training, though adequately gymnastic, offered very little in the way of creativity. I then began taking a powerful interest in the courses that certain of my school friends were engaged in: one was reading literature at Cambridge, and another was studying art at Wimbledon. What they were learning became as important to my development as my own training. When I left, having danced for a year with the Royal Ballet, I found that I had gained a great deal in terms of learning what it meant to have a discipline. This I applied to my writing and to performance art. The Theatre of Mistakes Performance Art Company engaged in workshops every day and believed in intense rehearsal periods – sometimes lasting for as long as two years! This was unusual at the time, since performance art was in general the domain of a reaction from disciplined art.

Later my engagement in the arts widened to include curating, and I directed the Cardiff Art in Time festival for several years. The interesting thing about this festival was that it pursued diverse radical strands, rather than specialising in one area such as performance art. It was hosted at The University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, and at Chapter. Students from different art colleges contributed performances, installations and photographic work during the day, while each evening was devoted to a particular strand – sound and avant garde music, then film, then performance art, then poetry and language. Of course there were a large number of cross-overs. The notion of the Art in Time team was that various small audiences for the progressive arts could be combined into a big audience if events were placed in proximity to each other. This proved correct – audiences of over three hundred for the poetry evenings, for instance! Very swiftly the festival grew into a major event attracting international artists and a very large audience indeed – well over 3000 over the course of the week.

A similarly eclectic philosophy informed Grey Suit: Video for Art and Literature, which I launched and edited on videotape in the 90s. We didn’t just want to showcase art-film, as we felt that the imagery became too fluid – too much of the same thing caused a surfeit. So we juxtaposed exciting new film ideas by artists such as Jayne Parker, Abigail Child and Tony Hill with rather dry readings by poets such as John Ashbery, F T Prince and Hugo Williams. We had foreign poets as well, and we had performance art by Station House Opera, Stelarc and Stuart Sherman among others. We had music by Derek Bailey and Phil Minton. Contrast was far more important than cohesion. We tended to avoid themes, as we felt that it was important to simply take the best work we could gather together for any one issue, and that a theme might hamper that process. Grey Suit is now in the archive of the BFI.

Last year I spent £160,000 creating The Room – a gallery in Tottenham Hale. The space is curated by me and the dancer and performance practitioner Genevieve Sayer. At The Room, we have an exhibition on the walls for ten weeks and while the exhibition is on, you can come to a monthly poetry reading or learn how to dance the tango or do yoga or creative writing with us. Between exhibitions, we have what we call the ‘White Weeks’ when for six weeks the gallery has nothing on its walls but is available for performance art.

In some ways, my interests have come full circle: I am once more intrigued in combining physical activity with creative activity – so the tango and yoga are now in the mix as well as performance and visual art, poetry and music events.

The danger with eclectic curation is that everything can begin to look cluttered. This is why we instituted the ‘White Weeks’. The tango looks fine in front of the exhibition, actually it provides us with a magical environment to dance in, and this is true for the monthly poetry evening as well. But a performance artist may well need absolute control of the visual and aural atmosphere. So a sort of schizophrenic approach prevails. You have to clear the space of one event in order for the next to operate effectively. Eclecticism works well in a time-based medium, such as on Grey Suit, but in a space the time-tabling has to be thought through extremely carefully. This is why we are loath to cram events in. Everything has to be as effective as it can possibly be. No rush. The exhibitions last ten weeks, because we’re out of the centre and a longer duration enables the artist to network and make appointments for artists, curators and other gallery people to see the show.

How does your approach differ from the monographic and group exhibitions of ‘professional’ curators of galleries or museums?

My approach may not differ that much from those of ‘professional’ curators, and plenty of professional curators and critics turn up and take note of what we show. Actually, the question reminds me of the sort of issues that were raised when the Theatre of Mistakes scandalised certain colleagues when, back in the 70s, it asserted that performance art could be a discipline and needed to establish itself. Remember that this was when a lot of performance practitioners were keen to drop out of disciplinary situations and poured scorn on established venues.

As far as each exhibition is concerned, we work very closely with the artist, and we want to help make the show as effective as possible – which is as true of Matt’s Gallery or the Lisson. The trouble is one has to be rather well-heeled to be an effective gallery-owner. Located where we are, with nothing but the quality of the space itself, and no funding, we see ourselves as a half-way house, where a new artist can put on a thoroughly professional show. We would be only too glad if one of our artists was subsequently taken on by a West End Gallery. That’s the idea. And we don’t plan to hold performance art jamborees. Each event is very carefully planned and adequately rehearsed in the space. The care that goes into the result extends to the packaging and the look of the event, including the card announcing it. We would like to do more about promotion as well, but both of us have to earn our living, so there sometimes just isn’t time to carry this aspect of the project through effectively.

Do you feel that the choices you make in your practice and in curating other artists/work are driven by external forces such as funding criteria, social agendas, audience development? And is this an impediment to artistic creativity?

Well, no, not at the moment. Since there isn’t any funding, I don’t have to worry about anyone else’s criteria. That’s true for social agenda and audience development. The weird thing is, were these issues, we’d sail through two of them. The social agenda includes hosting our community association, working with schools, providing jazz ballet for youngsters with little opportunity to express themselves in movement anywhere else, and our audience is both multi-ethnic and drawn from our cultural colleagues. Also we’re in Tottenham Hale, developing an audience in a grossly deprived area. Funding criteria is more problematic. It’s like the law. It’s said that they can always arrest you for something. Well, with funding criteria, they can always reject you for something. At present, we both work to finance our activities at The Room. I’m fed up with spending two months on an application that gets shot down after the Arts Council officers have vetted it and given one the impression that all its angles are covered. In my view, the lottery has really fucked things up. When the arts funding bodies were only answerable to the notional ‘tax-payer’, the arm’s length policy could prevail, and in general artistic quality was the yard-stick. Excellence was often rewarded. These days, because of the insidious power of the Lottery, the arts funding bodies are answerable to the ‘Sun-reader’ – a far more Philistine individual concocted by managerial busy-bodies who can use him to boot out anything that fails to fit their own officious agenda.

The computer has also had a debilitating effect. When a secretary had to re-type every adjustment to the criteria that a bureaucrat could dream up, funding criteria remained necessarily simple and clear. Nowadays, although the application form may appear simple, the ability to cut and paste in any whimsical adjustment has created a criteria-labyrinth which ultimately provides sufficient loopholes for the awarder of the grant to refuse anyone on impulse, actually, while justifying repeated sponsorship of their cronies. The result is less ‘answerability’, not more.

As far as running an unfunded project is concerned, I feel at present that being answerable to no one has its advantages. We can engage in a maverick approach to the arts, and no one can tell us that it’s not what we should be doing. Still, what is an impediment to artistic creativity is the need to earn a living – I teach in prisons, and I’m working with the homeless. This is rewarding, of course, but hugely time-consuming. Certain issues, such as promotion and forward planning, are difficult to resolve adequately because there just isn’t time during the day to cover them.

Self-indulgence or critical rigour? Without the interpretative or validating role of a gallery or museum curator how do you measure quality of work and the works’ ability to communicate to an audience?

This question is like worrying whether ‘all art is a wank’. Specialised institutions love talking about critical rigour, but all it amounts to is jobs for the boys. Universities and art-schools promote their own academics, who use their own institution as a vanity press! Genevieve and I discuss possible exhibitions and seek a mutual decision. This is to some extent to protect ourselves from importunate artists.

John Ashbery once said to me that he didn’t believe communication was possible, and I must say I’ve always lo

Erika Tan

The artist-curator is a strange hybrid of selecting and positioning your work and other artists work in unusual conceptual and contextual situations. How do you tackle this in your thinking, practice and selection process? And what, in your opinion, is the role/purpose of the artist-curator in the 21st Century?

I see my practice not as an ‘artist-curator’ but a multiplicity of practices where my job title as such, expands or contracts depending on the situation: artist/curator/researcher/writer/consultant/educator reflects more appropriately the shifting parameters and focus of my work.

This ‘expanded field’ is in part a response that I consider to be one of ‘need’, where, ‘need’ covers both the ability to financially sustain myself, but equally of importance, to find ways of sustaining the development of my practice as an artist. The roles of curating, writing, arts consultancy are ways in which I can attempt to have some dialogue with or impact upon the wider art structures that provide the opportunities, the frameworks, the interpretations and ultimately the limitations that can be placed on my art work.

My art practice is often a search for context, curating is in many ways an extension of this, providing ways to create contexts that I might as an artist be interested to work with, or to allow a diversity of decisions and explorations through working with other artists that I might not enjoy if concentrating purely on my own work. It is the ‘expanded dialogue’ that the ‘expanded field’ offers that underlines my interest in working this way and the choices of projects I gravitate towards and artists I seek to work with.

How does your approach differ from the monographic and group exhibitions of professional curators of galleries or museums?

I see the distinction between what I do and that of curators within institutions, not as a distinction between the status of ‘professionalism’, but rather the position of ‘independence’. This independence from the institution and its underlying agendas allows for a certain amount of freedom ie in the form of individualism, experimentation, contradiction, and critique... all important in maintaining the possibility of alternative voices within the sphere of art production, dissemination and reception. The ‘independent’ sector is for me an area which provides dynamism, vibrancy and diversity which fuels the art world but often goes under acknowledged. It is also an area from which alternatives to and critique of the art world and its hierarchical agendas can take place.

As such, I have not been interested in the monographic or group shows, preferring to take a more site-responsive approach often working round ideas such as: how an audience encounters art, the creation of points of engagement, the ‘non-art site’ and the ‘non-art audience’, the dialogue between artists and their works and the works of others, exploring cultural frameworks and strait-jackets, and finding new ways of discussing and exploring ongoing issues. As such, my approach is possibly more artist-centric, it’s not about sustaining the status quo or the institution’s needs and desires, but has become more about creating alternatives to this, and giving artists’ needs/desires and processes, a place of importance.

Do you feel that the choices you make in your practice and in curating other artists/work are driven by external forces such as funding criteria, social agendas, audience development? And is this an impediment to artistic creativity?

External forces are in some ways an integral part of the process of my art making practice. I describe my process of working as ‘site-responsive’ including within my definition of ‘site’, funding agendas and social policies. There is a point however, where these external forces are no longer productive and my ability to work around, with, through them wears thin. The interpretation of these agendas by many institutions often results in a very narrow range of opportunities passed onto artists, often translating the process of making art into a provision of services. Being able to intervene through the ‘expanded field’ of practices such as curating, writing, consultancy ie having a voice within these instrumental and interpretive roles, is one way in which I attempt to voice a counter position and expand the nature of opportunities and contexts within which artists work.

Self-indulgence or critical rigour? Without the interpretative or validating role of a gallery or museum curator how do you measure quality of work and the works ability to communicate to an audience?

I find the underlying implications in this question problematic. It highlights the assumptions in the previous questions of a dichotomy between the “professional”, transparent, ‘critically rigorous’ institution and its curators and the “strange hybrid” artist-curator, whose ‘role’ is ambiguous, work ‘self-indulgent’, and lacking frameworks of interpretation and validation. The implication of the self-serving artist, unable to create encounters of quality and engagement, lacking the skills to provide broader contextualising frameworks for interpretation and validation, highlights the problem of credibility that institutional frameworks have with those working on the ‘outside’. From my experience, and a reason for artists to work more broadly in a multiplicity of roles, is exactly because of the lack of critical rigour found within so many institutions. The idea that the museum/gallery institution can measure the quality of the work and its communicative powers relies more on the fact that these institutions are required for the purposes of funding to do so. However, in my opinion, qualitative assessments of work cannot be made without a profound engagement with, and understanding of, the work and the importance of an artist’s intentions. Galleries and museums have become well versed at box ticking, and audience counting, abilities from my perspective that are often overrated.

Erika Tan, artist/curator, British/Singapore. Work has evolved from an interest in anthropology and the moving image, often informed by specific cultural, geographical or physical contexts. Commissions and projects with Film & Video Umbrella, Picture This, BBC Radio London, Channel 4, The ICA, RiCHMiX, The British Council, East International, Hayward Gallery, Brighton & Hove Museum and Gallery, Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail.

Simon Tegala

The artist-curator is a strange hybrid of selecting and positioning your work and other artists’ work in unusual conceptual and contextual situations. How do you tackle this in your thinking, practice and selection process? And what, in your opinion, is the role/purpose of the artist-curator in the 21st Century?

In 2001 I curated an exhibition titled ‘Please Disturb Me‘, shown in the Great Eastern Hotel, London. The Great Eastern Hotel is a stunning and historically interesting Victorian station hotel. Dating back to the mid nineteenth-century it recently underwent a major refurbishment. Its gradual decline to a shabby run-down hotel where the rooms could be rented by the hour was replaced with splendour and extravagance through enormous financial investment. At the time of opening I was invited to spend a night there, with others, to check that the hotel was running correctly prior to its public launch. I realised that the hotel was a resonant space that was ripe for some kind of artistic intervention. I embarked on an idea of curating an exhibition largely down to the sheer size of the hotel that I would not be able to fill it with my work alone. Also I had not curated a show before and had been intrigued to do so. The hotel also occupied and represented a number of ideas of duality that were interesting for an artist to deal with. Firstly the location was a non-conventional space, not a gallery, museum or warehouse. It was a new and original location for an art show. It was a functioning commercial environment that had a rich history and recent reinvention. It was a hotel, a space that borders a public and private space that conjured intense emotions relating to travel, identity, anonymity and sexuality. The geographical location was on the border of the poor ‘creative’ East End and the rich unimaginative commercial sector of the city. The idea was to invite a select group of artists to spend a weekend at the hotel with a view that they would return and produce new site-specific artworks for the rooms, restaurants or public spaces of the hotel. The exhibition developed beyond these core artists to include, live performance, a writer, music and a video art programme, involving over forty artists. My role in the project was as producer, curator, fundraiser and participating artist. These roles are very definite and cannot be confused in the creation of such a project as they can have conflicting characteristics to each other.

The artist-curator is certainly a specific situation akin to the actor-director. Having been in many curated exhibitions of varying degrees of success. I wanted to curate an exhibition that was more about artists than artwork. Artists have a very specific relationship to each other. Artists communicate to one another and read artwork in ways that are different to the artist and curator relationship. There is I believe a bond between artists that curators have no access to.

The artists I chose were those I felt had an ability to work in and respond to a specific new environment. The uncertainty of what these artists would produce and its success was what made the project exciting for me. The project thus had a nervous excitement from the onset. This embrace of the risk element is the aspect of difference to the approach of a curator-led project. This uncertainty factor very often is something that curators are prevented from, unable or unwilling to approach such a project with. But for an artist-curator it becomes the driving impetus. It is this aspect I feel that distinguishes the two categories and will lead to the inevitable bifurcation to the curatorial venture.

How does your approach differ from the monographic and group exhibitions of ‘professional’ curators of galleries or museums?

Fundamentally the approach to my curatorial project is never embarked upon as being didactic or to elucidate specific themes or historical progressions. I am more interested in the contemporary and the new in art making. I am more interested in unusual sites and spaces. I am less concerned with highlighting links and forcibly forging connections. Ultimately I am not a professional curator nor do I intend to be one. I approach the curatorial medium via the idiosyncratic processes that inform my art making practice. The curated show becomes an artwork in its own right, and it is there that maybe I stamp my ownership over the entire project.

Do you feel that the choices you make in your practice and in curating other artists/work are driven by external forces such as funding criteria, social agendas, audience development? And is this an impediment to artistic creativity?

Social agendas and audience development are never concerns for me in the progression on my own practice. Funding is a very important issue for the development of any project. However it should never be seen as an obstacle for the achieving quality in the result, but a process of negotiation. It is vital that in the management of a project that a clear delineation of roles is adhered to. For example with ‘Please Disturb Me’ the total budget was in excess of £100,000. The project was entirely funded through private funds. My roles in the project were as producer, fundraiser, curator and artist, and these positions I kept as separate as possible to prevent conflicts of interest. A bit like making a film with actor, director, producer and executive producer. I think the biggest confusion most younger curators have is not understanding that these are very distinct roles in the successful completion of a project. In many instances working within a museum or gallery some of these roles are removed from the remit of the curator and therefore become less of a burden on the creative process. Though funding and fundraising is all part of a process of negotiation and circumnavigation rather than perceived or actual obstacle.

Self-indulgence or critical rigour? Without the interpretative or validating role of a gallery or museum curator how do you measure quality of work and the works’ ability to communicate to an audience?

With all the works I produce I must be and am more critical towards them than any external source might be, though ultimately it will come down to the response of the viewer. With public art in particular the audience will comprise the largest cross section, with a great number of them a non-art going public. It is actually the response of these people that I value the most so I attempt to build in mechanisms for feedback once the project is on public display. This is vital for the appraisal process.

Having exhibited widely internationally for the last ten years in many curated shows I have developed a critical rigour and good understanding of the mechanisms involved in the territory of the curated exhibition. Without wanting to appear too dismissive I do not feel that I require the validation of the established museum curator or the art world to ascribe value to my projects. Though the stamp of approval from such authority figures is always useful for political reasons if for nothing else.

Simon Tegala works across a range of media from drawing, photography, sculpture, film and video and digital based artworks, exhibiting internationally. Awarded the NESTA fellowship in 2000, and represented the UK in the 2003 Havana Biennial. Currently producing major works for the The British Museum and the Science Museum.

Gavin Wade

The artist-curator is a strange hybrid of selecting and positioning your work and other artists’ work in unusual conceptual and contextual situations. How do you tackle this in your thinking, practice and selection process? And what, in your opinion, is the role/purpose of the artist-curator in the 21st Century?

I suppose I find the idea of being an artist-curator to be normal. Rather than being a strange hybrid it is a necessary expanding of the responsibilities of the creative individual. In one sense involving curatorial systems within your practice as an artist allows you control over a larger terrain, which in turn allows you to choose to lose control within a larger terrain. I approach working with other artists in an organic and open manner. If I am interested in their processes I will approach them to find out more and this may lead to a project together. My role within that project is whatever is required or desired by myself or the other artist(s). I see these meeting points as vital collisions of ideas towards new unpredictable systems and structures, which I call art. I see the role of the artist-curator as producer, supporter, collaborator, interrogator, interruptor and meddler in all things. The artist-curator is a position of questioning, able to choose authorial positions and choose or be chosen as collaborator towards all manner of ends. I guess then I see my position as aspiring towards that of a comprehensivist and take the long-term outlook of hoping to learn a whole lot more than I currently do in order that I can put theory into practice and meddle a whole lot more.

How does your approach differ from the monographic and group exhibitions of ‘professional’ curators of galleries or museums?

Well, I would consider myself a professional curator. There may be some distinctions some of the time but probably not all of the time. I began to think of methodological approaches that I would not take such as chronological, interpretative, thematic or retrospective but actually they all sounded like they would be quite useful from time to time! I would be happy to curate a monographic show at the same time as collaborating with artists around the world in various sites developing artworks as publications to solve all the world’s problems. I don’t really see them as being exclusive. I would approach any project with my well-developed impulsive, idiosyncratic and intuitive processes in full flow but perhaps I am able to pursue these further than any institutional curator because it is clear that I represent myself and those that I work with whereas the institutional curator’s identity is prone to being suppressed.

Do you feel that the choices you make in your practice and in curating other artists/work are driven by external forces such as funding criteria, social agendas, audience development? And is this an impediment to artistic creativity?

In my sphere of thinking many of these external forces exist on the inside of the sphere as ‘big’ ideas that are not really focused on but are known, although I’m sure that some of them exist outside of the sphere as ‘small’ ideas that are too insignificant to include in any thinking process. Not very many find themselves on the active shell of the sphere as they are too generalised and obvious. I don’t see any of the points you mention as being an impediment really, they just exist and sometimes they are useful for how to frame a project and sometimes they are not. Some very positive funding criteria encourage good practice, for example the late RSA Art for Architecture Award, which I was a recipient of, led me to collaborate with a very interesting architect, Celine Condorelli. I have now been working with her for more than two years. None of the work we have made together dwells on the funding process but rather on other contexts and problems that we choose as sites of potential.

Self-indulgence or critical rigour? Without the interpretative or validating role of a gallery or museum curator how do you measure quality of work and the works’ ability to communicate to an audience?

Through a highly developed intuition and self belief!

Gavin Wade, artist-curator and Research Fellow in Curating at the University of Central England. Current projects include: ‘Support Structure Phase 1-6’, 2003-6, with architect Celine Condorelli (www.supportstructure.org); ‘Strategic Questions’, 2002-2007 (www.strategicquestions.org); Public Structures at GuangZhou Triennial, GuangZhou and Creek Art Centre, Shanghai, China, Nov 2005; and ‘ArtSheffield05: Spectator T’ (www.artsheffield.org).

This interview was published in November 2006 Good Practice publication Negotiating your practice.

Mark Wilsher

The artist-curator is a strange hybrid of selecting and positioning your work and other artists' work in unusual conceptual and contextual situations. How do you tackle this in your thinking, practice and selection process? And what, in your opinion, is the role/purpose of the artist-curator in the 21st Century?

Artists have always organised their own exhibitions at some level and to me it seems the most natural extension of a creative practice. What is strange is actually the rise and professionalisation of a managerial class of ‘curators’ who don’t make work themselves. Of course they might claim that putting on an exhibition involves addressing many of the same questions, but nevertheless curating is necessarily tied to administrative problems (from personal politics to health and safety) that don’t tend to impinge on the studio.
Putting on exhibitions is exactly like making art in that it’s about proposing alternative models of the present and the future. From my own position as an artist I simply try to curate shows with artists I respect that I would like to go and see myself. The world I am creating becomes the implicit context for my own work, although I don’t tend to include myself the exhibitions, probably to the detriment of my own visibility as an artist. In fact the only occasion on which I gave myself a show was when a well-known artworld figure (who I shall resist the temptation to name) let me down at the last minute leaving me in the lurch.

How does your approach differ from the monographic and group exhibitions of ‘professional’ curators of galleries or museums?

I can be more flexible, more subjective, more obscure, more wilful, more far out, more risky, more fun and more dumb than a larger institution. At both the Virgin Megastore project space and Tablet gallery I programmed solo exhibitions and new commissions almost exclusively. This was as a result of wanting to work with particular artists in a very focussed way. It is always the physical experience of encountering a specific piece of work that I’m trying to stage and get across. I don’t think it is necessarily the type of exhibition that artist-curators do differently, but rather the nature of their relationships with other artists. The whole process can be less hierarchical and more speculative. At the new space opening soon in Peckham Square we will be doing something different, creating relationships between individual pieces and setting up a situation of movement and flux. It’s a more conceptual approach, but one still very much grounded in the experience of the encounter.

Do you feel that the choices you make in your practice and in curating other artists/work are driven by external forces such as funding criteria, social agendas, audience development? And is this an impediment to artistic creativity?

Every situation has its parameters, and often as an artist your role is to articulate or respond to those forces somehow. I think that the pressure of funding criteria is felt more strongly when it comes to curating (perhaps only because it is possible to work individually largely without external funding). But I have found that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes tight restrictions can lead to an imaginative and unexpected outcome as you try to circumvent the apparent problem. Ideally, the funding body itself will be open to creative approaches to the fulfillment of its objectives, and will ultimately take on board the new models that are being presented to it by artists.

It’s easy to be cynical about fulfilling funding criteria, but my experience programming for a genuinely multi-ethnic general public at Tablet gallery transformed my view of the role and nature of art, and has affected both my curatorial stance and my own artistic practice tremendously. Don’t forget that there are real people and real communities behind those statistics.

Self-indulgence or critical rigour? Without the interpretative or validating role of a gallery or museum curator how do you measure quality of work and the works’ ability to communicate to an audience?

Well, this is the big question for all artists isn’t it? Personally I’m all in favour of self-regulation. A good artist is constantly reassessing their work and its success and/or failure with the audience. It’s an integral part of the creative process. I would like to think that artists (and audiences) are open to different forms of success and nuances of quality that might slip between the validating filters of institutionalised curators. But once again, it’s really down to the flexibility of the individuals charged with fulfilling these roles.

A museum might have studiously collected audience data for years, which could ultimately be completely irrelevant to artistic issues. Could that be called self-indulgence? An artist might ignore the issue of accountability entirely and yet produce the most rigorous, fantastic artwork. In which case let’s have more ‘self-indulgence’ all round.

Mark Wilsher, artist, writer and curator currently working on a new gallery project to be built by Will Alsop in Peckham Square. Curatorial work has focused on unusual public spaces that attract a non-specialist audience, while my own artworks are concerned with decision making, improvisation and assertion. Forthcoming projects include After Art School at London Gallery West in April/May 2006.

The writer

Manick Govinda manages the Artists’ Advisory service at Artsadmin. Producer, facilitator for artists’ projects, talent scout for NESTA’s Creative Pioneers Programme and commissioning editor for a-n. Project manager for the decibel Investment in Artists and Curators programme.
www.artsadmin.co.uk
www.nesta.org.uk/theacademy/home.html

Hannah Firth is Curator at Chapter, Cardiff and Co-Director for 'May You Live In Interesting Times', Cardiff Festival of Creative Technology, 28-30 October 2005
www.chapter.org
www.mayyouliveininterestingtimes.org

Manick Govinda

Interviews devised and conducted by Manick Govinda.
Editorial advisor Hannah Firth.

First published: a-n.co.uk November 2005