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Curating Degree Zero Archive at the West Cork Arts Centre |
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Welcome to the Graduate School
of Creative Arts & Media's -
Curating Degree Zero Archive at the West
Cork Art Centre project - sub-site. This site will be
developed on a daily basis over the run of the project (in spring 2008 - now ended) to
help frame and expand upon the discussions generated by the
public presentation of a key information and research resource
in respect of contemporary art practice.
The
Curating Degree Zero Archive is a unique experiment in
the mapping of ten years of contemporary art debates and practices.
The archive will be on view and available to the public at
the West
Cork Art Centre (WCAC) from March 15th 2008. While the
archive is open to the public there will also be audio recordings
of interviews with curators
and othe rcontemporary arts practitioners examining the issues
raised by the construction and dissemination of the archive.
There will also be a series of seminars with students, researchers
and the general public over the run of the project at the
WCAC.
We will begin uploading content from the first day of the
run of the project at WCAC
on Saturday March 15th. |
 Unpacking:
The crates are unpacked.
(Bookmark this site and access audio recordings and written
texts produced in response to the public presentation of the
Curating
Degree Zero Archive.) |
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Unpacking.
When invited to work with the West Cork Arts Centre on this
project, I began by asking the simple question of friends
and colleagues: ‘what is a curator? What does that word
“curator” mean, if anything, for you?’
My assumption was that, in spite of more than a decade of
expansive and widely disseminated conversations about, and
among, curators, there still remains a considerable gap between
professional and public understandings of what a ‘curator’
might be and what they might do as part of their working life.
Talking to Ann Davoren, the director of the West Cork Arts
Centre, I formed the impression that the presentation of a
set of publications (by, about, and – in a certain sense
- for curators) presented more than the usual challenges of
the typical exhibition of contemporary art.
The works on display would not be artworks as such –
not discrete artefacts for contemplation – but complex
compilations of texts, images, and recordings that documented,
described, interpreted, and speculated upon a very diverse
range of artworks, art projects, contemporary social cultural
and political concerns and broader philosophical problems
and issues at work in contemporary culture. (MW)
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 Parcels:
The individual packages of curator's printed matter, CDs,
DVDs, VHS tapes etc. are laid out for unwrapping.
So Much Stuff: The individual packs contain
up to 30 items by one curator or curatorial team. |
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The Archive: Practices of Display.
There was a further complication then, that this wasn’t
just a collection of ‘stuff’ by and about curators
and the artists with whom they collaborated. This was something
called an ‘archive.’
If ‘curator’ might be assumed to sound somewhat
off-the-beaten track for a general audience - ‘archive’
would almost definitely sound somewhat dusty and moribund
– not an especially attractive term.
It was clear that when this ‘archive’ of ‘curators’
work was presented elsewhere in Europe, the strategies adopted
for exhibition tended to emphasise visual display –
i.e. the published materials were assembled in gallery spaces
in a stylised exhibition format that was consistent with the
conventions of a gallery exhibition crossing-over with those
of a museum book shop. The archive, when exhibited in the
past, looked attractive, even if the word didn’t sound
that way.
In discussion with the team working at the Centre, it was
decided to adopt a simple strategy of informal presentation
using a plain bench along the walls of the gallery supplemented
by tables as necessary. Thye concern was to encourage people
to feel comfortable browsing the material, picking it up,
reading, and generally using the space as a reading and viewing
room. (MW)
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 Making Lists:
Preparing to display material, we itemised the elements in
each package to check against the inventory.
Stopping to Read Stuff: It took a long time
to itemise everything that would be on display, because we
kept stopping to read things - it was hard to put down some
of the texts and catalogues. |
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From Bremen to Skibbereen.
The basic point of departure for this project was a conference
held in Bremen in 1998. The work presented in the archive
has grown as the project has toured different venues and countries
around Europe. There is no single common theme across the
work gathered. However, there is a generalised tendency evidenced
in this work which suggests that it is rooted in oppositional
cultures, cultures of social and political activism, protest
or commentary.
There is a strong sense in much of the material assembled
here of an ethos of ‘do-it-yourself’ – DIY,
sometimes referred to as ‘self-organised’ and
sometimes pointing to the key role of artist-curators –
artworkers who take on the role of organising, eventing and
distributing their own work and that of their friends. There
is also a clear move to use print media and other media forms
as spaces not just for commentary on art, but as spaces for
the realisation of artworks – sometimes in a precious
way, sometimes in a throwaway manner.
There is something of a tension, I think, between the ephemeral
– made to be used and discarded – quality of some
of this material and the attempt to preserve the material
in an organised collection – not just a set of ‘stuff’,
but a coordinated assemblage of materials linked to ‘authors’
– in this case curator-authors – and brought together
under an overarching principle of professional and social
networks shared by these curator-authors.
The ‘archive’ in general has become a key idea
for researchers , practitioners and writers on contemporary
culture. Many artists now produce not discrete objects and
images, but vast assemblages of organised information, images,
objects and people, all gathered together around particular
questions, ideas, propositions or contemporary points of interest,
controversy or contest.
Indeed, there is the sense that exhibiting archives can become
something of a cliche. As one artist, Sarah
Pierce, suggests in the fanzine 'feint' (No.
3) the presentation of an 'archive as art' can sometimes be
mistakenly assumed to be 'democratic and transparent and innovative.'
The presumption being that when a collection of materials
is presented in this way, the individual user / viewer / reader
has the opportunity to make their own choices about what is
and what is not important; about what should and should not
be attended to. (MW) |
 Diverse Material:
The material deals with an extraordinarily diverse range of
issues from the politics of education to the self-organisation
of activist communities; from new technologies to cultural
policy.
Contexts: We discussed how this material
might be used in the immediate local context of Skibbereen
- the famous 'capital' of West Cork - a unique town with a
very specific cultural mix of established and new communities;
with a wide range of local cultural initiatives, organisations,
clubs and societies. |
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Specialist and General Readership.
Skibbereen has been the site of previous archive-based projects.
Artist, Neva Elliot, worked with the West Cork Arts Centre
and the Skibereen Public Library in the late summer of 2006
on a research project called 'Archiving Skibbereen' which
gathered information on groups, clubs, and societies in the
area and their various activities, interests and skills.
The work that artists do, can now sometimes look like the
work of an educator, a conference manager, an event organiser,
a publicist, a bureaucrat, a political activist, a publisher
or a social worker. This is a development that has been happening
for many decades, but which has intensified in many ways in
the last two decades.
Some people find these changes in contemporary art practices
since the 1960s at odds with their expectations of artworks.
While some people find value in individual projects without
worrying too much about the overall tendencies of contemporary
art. And some people attempt to interpret larger global trends
in these changes in art practice – attempting to map
a pattern of transformation from an emphasis on craft-based
image and object production to an emphasis on professionalised
organisational and ‘public intellectual’ type
work patterns and attempting to produce persuasive explanations
of why this is so. (MW)
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Practices of Display: It is interesting
how practices of display function in the window-spaces of
the town's streets.
Unnamed Documents: Unpacking the archive
also meant finding things that were unattributed to any one
curator's package and simply marked as 'unnamed documents':
the phraze struck me as poetic and ominous. |
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Producing Contradictions and Decisions.
Being a professional educator working in these areas of contemporary
culture, I of course get very caught up in these discussions
with my colleagues, with researchers and with students and
sometimes lose sight of how far removed these concerns can
be from the general run of everyday life. This is a funny
contradiction to work through. Much of the changes in art
working practices of recent decades have been driven by the
attempt by artists, curators and others to get past the ‘high’
cultural separation of art from the world of everyday life.
Artists and curators – and by now I am hoping that
you have a sense of the word ‘curator’ as a name
for someone who collaborates with artists in various ways
to promote the initiation, completion, distribution, discussion,
and reflective encountering of all kinds of art projects from
exhibitions to events to publications and so forth - these
artists and curators have for many decades being pursuing
many different strategies for knitting art ideas and ways
of thinking into everyday life situations and processes. |
Example of Archive in Practice: This is a
shot of two art and design researchers from MAKHU in Utrecht,
Netherlands, working on a research project into public space,
practices of social exclusion / inclusion and urban regeneration.
In the background there is an example of
the collaborative construction of an archive as part of this
type of work on public space and cultural politics. |
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Displaying the Archive.
At the same time, those professionally involved in art are
constantly caught between this generalising tendency to engage
the broadest sense of the everyday world and a specialising
tendency that tries to keep in view a strong sense of the
particular attitudes and histories that make up the distinctive
traditions of modern art making. These contradictory pulls
often lead to confused and troubled breakdowns in conversation
and communication – I often find myself tripping up
over my own way of speaking even as I imagine I am trying
to speak plainly and for a general audience. (There are controversies,
of course, over this rather clumsy notion of ‘general
audience’ and related ways of speaking about ‘the
public’ – we can so easily assume someone else
is the public and not us.)
All these considerations are driving towards the question
of how to present the material from the Curating Degree Zero
Archive and how to engage specialists and generalists in conversations
with each other. We probably don’t want the specialists
to turn into ‘teachers’ explaining stuff or to
turn the generalists into ‘pupils’ who must study
from those who presume they know something ‘special.’
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A Modest Proposal.
The key thing here is perhaps modesty. A modest project that
is somewhat understated and it proposes some – modest
– rewards for spending a little time perusing, reading,
browsing through the pre-occupations of some people, who work
very hard at their pre-occupations – even if they are
often unsure of exactly what it is that pre-occupies them.
To this end, the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media
and the West Cork Arts Centre are working together in a –
modest – collaboration to explore the possibilities
of contemporary art conversations in a small contemporary
town in West Cork. Please join us in these conversations.
(MW - Mick Wilson, Dean of the Graduate School of Creative
Arts ande Media - www.gradcam.ie
- has been invited by WCAC to work on the presentation of
the Curating Degree Zero Archive.) |
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Curators currently represented in the archive:
Arts
Initiative Tokyo (JP)
Rosanne
Altstatt (USA)
Amasté
(E, Basque Country)
Artlab
(UK)
Anthony
Auerbach (UK)
B+B
(UK)
Basekamp (USA)
Marius Babias (D)
Ute Meta Bauer (D)
Lorenzo Benedetti (ITA)
Tobias Berger (D, NZ)
Ursula Biemann (CH)
Beatrice Von Bismarck (D)
Lionel Bovier (CH)
Tim Brennan (UK)
c a l c (E)
camouflage (BE)
Ele Carpenter (UK)
Daniela Cascella (ITA)
Barbara Clausen (A)
consonni (E)
Copenhagen Free University (DK)
CRUMB (UK)
Alice Creischer & Andreas Siekmann (D)
D.A.E (E)
Catherine David (F)
Joshua Decter (A)
Clémentine Deliss (UK)
Claire Doherty (UK)
Barnaby Drabble (UK, CH)
Sergio Edelsztein (IL)
Eichelmann, Faiers & Rust (UK)
EIPCP (A)
Octavian Esanu (Mo)
Jacob Fabricius (DK)
Elena Filipovic (BE)
Fiteiro Cultural (BR, CH)
Freee (UK)
Sönke Gau (D)
David Goldenberg (UK)
Horst Griese (D)
Frederikke Hansen (DK, D)
Kent Hansen (DK)
Maria Hlavajova (NL)
Justin Hoffmann (D)
Andrew Hunt (UK)
Per Hüttner (SW, F)
K&K (D)
Christoph Keller (D)
Alexander Koch (D)
Annette Kosak (CH)
Holger Kube Ventura (D)
Kuratorisk Aktion (D/DE)
Daniel Kurjakovic (CH)
Simon Lamuniere (CH)
Kelly Large (UK)
Maria Lind (D)
Locus + (UK)
Chus Martinez (E)
Bernd Milla (D)
Elke aus dem Moore (D)
Nina Möntmann (D)
Heike Munder (CH)
Lise Nellemann (DK, D)
Tone Olaf Nielsen (DK)
Hans Ulrich Obrist (F)
Paul O'Neill (UK)
Marion von Osten (D)
Planet22 (CH)
Tadej Pogacar (SL)
Protoacademy (UK)
Catherine Queloz (CH)
Reinigungsgesellschaft (D)
RELAX (CH)
Dorothee Richter (D)
Maria Riskova (SL)
Stella Rollig (A)
Sabine Schaschl-Cooper (CH)
Annette Schindler (CH)
Katharina Schlieben (D)
Eva Schmidt (D)
Trebor Scholz (USA)
Marco Scotini (ITA)
Yukiko Shikata (JP)
Nathalie Boseul Shin (KR)
Gregory Sholette (USA)
Lisette Smits (NL)
Reinhard Storz (CH)
Bettina Steinbrügge (D)
Szuper Gallery (UK/D)
Toasting Agency (F)
TNC Network (F)
Attila Tordai (RO)
Trinity Session (SA)
Mark Tribe (USA)
Unwetter (D)
Value (CH)
Yvonne Volkart (CH)
Stevan Vukovic (SR)
Gavin Wade (UK)
Florian Waldvogel (D)
Cristine Wang (USA)
Astrid Wege (D)
Jan Van Woensel (BE)
Ina Wudtke, NEID (D)
Florian Wüst (D)
Tirdad Zolghadr (CH, IR)
Tal Ben Zvi (IL) |
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