Group Focus

Inside of the Witte de With, at the occasion of the Rotterdam Dialogues.

Back from Rotterdam, where Marlène Perronet and I attended the “Rotterdam Dialogues” on “the curators”. We transcribe below a discussion we had with Martin Boeckhout, a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy of Science at the University of Amsterdam.

Martin Boeckhout
So what is this thing called curating or the curatorial? Considered sociologically as a profession it is likely to not have one “essential” definition but rather a struggle for demarcation with some outside, real or imagined – and then the question would be what this struggle is about. But what’s specific about curating as a practice? What does it concern itself with? Does it have any specific techniques, objects, …?

Marlène Perronet
Actually, what I got out of these “Rotterdam Dialogues” was the question of the audience was the big issue. Curating artists or art was not so on the spot. Curating something else than art was even described as a fashion. While Irit Rogoff was insisting on the fact curatorial was “implicating us, rather than explaining to us”, Sabine Breitweiser would state a curator should “create meaning, generate knowledge”… Renske Janssen concluded that curating couldn’t deal without techniques of communication. Manray Hsu even stated for him, exhibition was a kind of communication, thus associating the exhibition to a genre.

Elodie Dufour
And to go further with Irit Rogoff’s position, she said: “the meaning is never produced in isolation or through isolating processes but rather through intricate webs of connected-ness”. In this “Rotterdam Dialogues” as audiences can be a part of the nature of an exhibition space, we were a part of the dialogues positions.
How from that, create another language of learning peer to peer? Jan Hoet put this posture of trusting the peers’ intuitions rather than dealing with theoretical statements.
According to Hou Hanru, mentioning the fact that art was not exempt from the globalization process, the desire of cities to have their own contemporary art Biennales is in a way similar to the Coca-Cola campaign. Creating the need of contemporary art would be a goal, like Coca-Cola managed to create a need for its drink in India! But a person in the audience reacted by saying it could be more efficient to convince the audience to be curious to art, to introduce the public by playing with the art practice as a curator and become “a passeur” to the exhibition space.

MB @ ED, en aparte
Sorry for digressing but well, if collective identity and trauma is your topic, I suppose Rotterdam is a fine place to start, what with the entire city center having been bombed in 1940. Ossip Zadkine’s memorial statue is the best-known monument to this. More recently, plans have been made to mark the ‘fire boundary’ following the bombing (see here and look for ‘marking the fire boundary’ underneath ‘the bombing of Rotterdam’). Perhaps one could see this as an “event of knowledge”?

Left: Ossip Zadkine, The Destroyed City, Rotterdam. Picture by Lin Mei

MP
This is again bringing a question of genre: this is here a memorial, commissioned by the city to designers in order to fulfill a “devoir de mémoire”. Mentioning this process of diffusion of knowledge and the “genre” art could take in order to fulfill its duty reminds me the wordgame Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev made between the “Stendhal syndrome” and what she called the “Biennale Syndrome”. She added a historical comparison between biennales and television: Biennales were seen as a threat from the point of view of connoisseurs, the way television in Italy, mentioning Pasolini, the diffusion format being a threat.

MB
Perhaps another analogy or inspirational example for curating from the field of science: have you heard about “biocuration”? Basically, this is about organizing (re)presenting biological information. The challenge facing contemporary molecular biology is enormous. The amounts of data currently generated and processed by genomics techniques (focusing on understanding our genetic make-up) is quite ludicrous and needs incredible amounts of work not just to be made accessible but also to be made understandable. Earlier dreams of simply mapping ‘the’ human genome have shattered: it turns out that the genetic make-up of humans is much more complex (DNA hardly determines anything, it’s just a co-constituent of many biological processes – albeit an important one). The response has been to up the challenge: more data, more kinds of data, more connections, more “annotations” to what specific parts of our genome (as well as other molecules, such as proteins) actually do, what they are “associated with”. Biocuration is a new specialty, so there are people who are nowadays “working as a biocurator”, but in effect it’s not even accurate to say that: biocuration is a collective endeavour through and through. The entire field of molecular biology is, one could say, “implicated” in “curating” our human biological make-up. It’s quite interesting to me that apparently contemporary scientists compare a part of their core business not so much to the creative novelty-generating spirit of the artist, but rather to the nitty-gritty work of the curator… Something in the way we think about the workings of science seems to be shifting quite dramatically in the age of ubiquitous data! But perhaps these new developments in science would also be an interesting way to think about curation in a more broader sense – or even an inspiration to rethink what curation should be about in a digital age?

ED
Hey, but we should go, let’s discuss about it later…