Curing Curation

Stefan Brüggemann, Today I Misunderstood, 2002;
 print on canvas; 58 2/3 x 46 1/16 inches

J.C. Fregnan / Stefan Brüggemann

“[A]ll bricolages are not equally worthwhile.”
— Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology“The pure work of art implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who yields the initiative to words, set in motion by the clash of their inequalities... Everything becomes suspense, a fragmentary disposition with alternations and oppositions, all working towards the total rhythm of the white spaces, which would be the poem silenced.”
— Stéphane Mallarmé, Crise du versCURATOR has long been a pliable signifier. A direct loan from Latin, it derives from the transitive verb curare, which meant both “to cure” in its various senses and, generically, “to be in charge of.” This pliability was distended further when, some centuries after its import into English, the noun curator was back-formed into the pseudo-Latinate verb “to curate.” While the neologism retained curare’s transitivity, the particular set of objects with which it engaged began to broaden: curare implied the administration of people and bodies (human) or, when curing meat, animals; with the linguistic advent of curation, this subject-object relationship opened up to include the administration or arrangement of things. This transition marks a certain horizon of curatorial signification: suddenly a curator-subject was empowered—indeed, expected—to announce elocutionary presence, to say nothing of virtuosity, in and through the meaningful ordering of objects. 1 Insofar as Modern and contemporary art practices have challenged the specific materiality or substantiality of art objects, the concept of curation has had to accommodate immaterial or insubstantial kinds of artistic projects that might nevertheless be organized into a legible, meaningful order. This historical generalization of the objects of curation has had the effect of reducing its concept to a set of relationships between order and meaning and, consequently, authorizes the designation of any practice of ordering as curation. The programming of a concert series, be it for Lincoln Center or the Vans Warped Tour, meets the criteria of curation. Editing a magazine is curation; writing an essay is curation. Roman Jakobson’s theory of the poetic function of language attempts to specify precisely those relationships between order and meaning that would animate and organize this generalized curatorial locution.2 Poetics, in his analysis, is a production of meaning that establishes an equivalence between two processes: selection and combination. He describes the former as a process in which one element is selected from a series of grammatically (but not aesthetically) interchangeable units. The pronoun “he” would be grammatically interchangeable with the proper noun “Jean-Christophe,” for example; the verb “writes” with “prestidigitates.” In a more conventionally art-specific context, the analogous units of selection would be an individual work of art or, alternatively, the work of an individual artist in a group show. The unit thus selected is then combined with others in a horizontal chain. The poetic value of this combination emerges from the correspondence between the two processes: “he writes” versus “Jean-Christophe prestidigitates.” Or this particular piece of art juxtaposed with that particular piece inscribes a meaning that neither piece could produce in isolation. Such a model of poetics would seem to guarantee a place for a signifying curator-subject. (Indeed, curation is considered deficient when the selection and combination of art too openly narrates the curator’s own subjectivity: that is, when curation is clearly motivated by profiteering or nepotism or careerism or personal taste.) Unacknowledged in Jakobson’s account, however, is the radical consequence that according to poetics reduced to the two-dimensional plane of selection and combination, any and all practices of ordering produce meaning. The categorical distinction between production and consumption thus loses its rigor, and with it the specific subjectivity of the curator: if the program director of a concert series produces curatorial meaning, then so, too, does any bored festivalgoer who ambles idly from stage to stage. So, too, does the engineer who designs the algorithm according to which digital tuners selectively identify radio signals; so, too, does the government administrator who regulates radio stations’ applications for assigned carrier frequencies. And so on. What these examples make clear is that the possibility of curatorial meaning bears no necessary connection to the poetic intention of curator-subject. The generalizability of curation is not something to lament. Nor does the omnipresence of the generalized curator-subject herald the obsolescence or impossibility of curatorial practice. Rather, it should stimulate us, curator-subjects and curator-audiences alike, to develop the signifying possibilities of curation even further. Most urgent for this development is the question of where we might locate an irreducibly curatorial meaning that cannot be assimilated to ordering in general. We might well begin by reexamining the foundations of Jakobson’s model of poetics to better articulate it with curation’s specificities.

Stefan Brüggemann, Nothing at all, 2003;
print on canvas; 58 2/3 x 46 1/16 inches

 

Under certain circumstances, the linear chain of combination collapses two or more simultaneous orders of difference. In spoken or written language—the basis on which Jakobson develops his model—difference is obtained at the level of the (indivisible) word. In the curatorial ordering of music, by contrast, the difference between two adjoining songs might also include a difference at the level of genre: that is, the combination of an R&B song with a pop song potentially inscribes a meaning that two consecutive pop songs do not. Art curation (narrowly defined) works in this additional register of difference when a photographic portrait, for instance, is exhibited alongside a Surrealist photogram. Finally, curatorial combination can signify at yet another level of difference: that of sensory experience. The visual experience of a photograph, that is, can be combined with the auditory experience of a sound sculpture or, unavoidably, with the spatial-temporal experience of a museum, a gallery, a pavilion. A more precise figure for modeling such a multidimensional curatorial poetics might then be something like the molecular structure of a crystal rather than a chain. This forking of the notion of combination also has the effect of recursively throwing into relief the fragile unity of the “individual” works being selected. The experience of observing a photograph while hearing a sound installation (or, inversely, the experience of watching a musical performance) confounds the putative sensory or phenomenal distinguishability of visual art from sound, from touch, from scent. In its radical form, then, curation would elect not to assume the inviolability of individual art pieces or practices on any level. It would then be free to focus its attentions both at the points of the “internal” divisibility of its constituent units, as well as on the flexibility of the peculiar adhesive that acts to fold them into a signifying crystal. The ubiquity of generalized curator-subjects would dis(re)solve as curation—would work toward its own syntax, its own total rhythm of spaces, of spacing. In order to suggest somewhat more concretely the forms such a curatorial poetics of the in/between might take, I close these reflections with a brief set of passages excerpted from the memoirs of Juda Treulos, a Swiss engineer based in Schaffhausen during the middle part of the twentieth century. Although the objects about which he wrote were gramophone sound recordings, his observations unwittingly describe a powerful model for shuffling curation loose from the strictures of a two-dimensional plane of ordering. In his account, the unintentional, nonsubjective and multidimensional disordering of an archive produces a set of multisensory experiences that confounds a straightforward, linear poetics. On April 1, 1944, the United States Air Force mistakenly bombed Schaffhausen, resulting in over a hundred deaths, causing millions of Swiss francs in property damage and violating Swiss neutrality during World War II. At the time, Treulos served as Technical Director at a regional Schaffhausen radio post. His duties included the administration of a collection of state and commercial recordings, which included a modest library of classical music pressed by Deutsche Grammophon in Hanover. While the radio station itself was not hit by any of the misdirected ordnances, the same was not true for the factory immediately adjacent, home of the famous International Watch Company. Miraculously, the bomb did not detonate. The shock of its impact, however, and damage from the numerous fires in the vicinity effectively gutted the Schaffhausen radio station. Visiting the site on April 2, Treulos wrote: From the street I could detect the disturbing rumor of a complex smell—first the sharpness of wood smoke but then, hovering beneath, something like the burning of a candle. Inside the station the smell of resin was more pronounced and eventually I realized it had risen from the poor gramophone discs... The white walls of the vestibule have been painted with soot. All but one of our posters were burnt down—even the one that remains hangs curled at the edges and horribly distorted, the players and instruments of the Berliner Philharmoniker blackened and bubbled... The great hall clock had been dislodged—canted against the wall, the movement of its hands lugubrious, marking some irregular unit of time... [In the studio] it was strangely quiet, though my ears continued to ring from the force of last night’s percussions. It seemed somehow that the place had opened up, though all of its walls continue to stand—there was a new echo in the studio that cut away all the intimacy I have come to feel in that space, so accustomed there to a closeness [Geschlossenheit] of sound. I felt the irrational urge to keep silent, as though I were stepping lightly and respectfully through a mausoleum. But the floor was littered with the remains of most of our library—I could not avoid crushing loudly underfoot those precious brittle discs to which I had previously attended with such care and tenderness—each step became as a knife in me, I did not want to add to the destruction already wreaked. For a moment I thought I spied, on a corner shelf, a cache of undamaged discs. When I moved to lift these, however, I discovered that some of them had been fused together—two, sometimes three discs forming a hybrid creature... I could not help but utter a mournful chuckle at some of the strange bedfellows this unconscionable attack had united—Strauss fused to Durey, imagine! A devilish curiosity as much as my technician’s responsibility motivated me to test one of these hybrids... it sounded as though the recording [of Die Fledermaus] had been achieved at some great distance. The surface of the double-disc undulated, and as the needle rode along the disc’s curve the orchestra slid madly in and out of time... [T]he heat of the flames that had fused the two discs [had] softened [the waxed coating of] the tracks in the shellac... What terrible new music was this, rained on us from above? 3

1. The medical ordering of bodies, too, was—and is—a signifying practice. The possibility of signification in such cases, however, inheres bilaterally in the subjectivities of both curator and cured.
2. See “Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics” in Semiotics: An introductory anthology, edited by Robert Innis (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985).
3. I am grateful to Andrea Paasch for her swift and able translations. Emphasis are mine.

-Rachael