You Kant Always Get What You Want

Saul Alverez, Primary ventures in house-breaking
or Pissing my pants while wearing a coyote pelt, 2005

 

Joao Ribas & Matt Sheridan Smith

Joao Ribas: As curating becomes more and more “visible,” that is, as the field constructs its own history and the charge of the curator expands beyond its traditional role, a certain antagonism seems to have arisen. This revolves around the ostensive division of labor between artist and curator and the denotation of meaning this implies. There seems to be a resistance to the supposed intrusion of one into the other—something that I think comes from a desire for a “zero degree” condition, in which the autonomy of artworks is somehow not intruded upon by any interpretative imposition. This desire for the unmediated impact of an artwork—a certain iconophilic need revolving around access to the unadulterated value of an art object—seems akin to the desire for the primal scene versus the interpretative gesture. Matt Sheridan Smith: This antagonism you speak of often relies on an assumption that the “unmediated impact of the artwork” in the end equals an unmediated communication between the artist’s subjectivity—which should of course be “radical” or “visionary” or, in the very least, singular—and the viewer: a one-to-one line from genius to viewer. Although I guess that description is a bit outdated in all but the most old-fashioned circles by now, so really, we should assume that there is some consensus about the discursive or dialogic role of art. In any case, it’s interesting to me that a dialogue between artist and viewer or critic is seen as valid according to the current understanding of how to interact with a work of art, but a high level of dialogue between an artist and curator in the presentation—or even in the production of work, which I admit can be problematic (but also interesting)—is sometimes seen as compromising. This idea of intrusion is really baffling to me. Is interpretation after the exhibition by viewers any less “intrusive” in this sense than the interpretive/contextualizing role a curator plays in making an exhibition? If anything, I think that position actually overstates the role of the exhibition itself in the life of an artwork. J Ribas: There are two things you mention that bare developing. One is a change in the models of production, which in an odd way have partly veered off into a blurred territory on both sides in the last three decades. The distinction between “studio” and “exhibition space” that defines some of the inherited hierarchy in the roles of artist and curator—think of the trope of the studio in nineteenth-century painting for example—doesn’t quite hold up in contemporary terms…and some curatorial models revolve around the notion of producer rather than organizer of exhibitions. Certainly, ideas of “postproduction” or “site specificity” or “collectivity” undermine a clear distinction between traditional roles. The second is the nature of the interpretative gesture itself, which is always characterized in the history of aesthetic thought (at least since Kant) as a deferral, a reflective judgment after the fact. But, then, why should the curatorial gesture be negatively defined as dismantling a supposed line between artist and viewer rather than the other way around, as if an artwork were an utterance—already a terrible fallacy—and curating amounts to an interruptive stutter? M Smith: Maybe it’s nostalgia for that very brief period (relatively speaking) where art really was seen as an object of pure contemplation: a transcendent object, etc., which wasn’t really that long ago if you look at the whole history of aesthetic production, to use a broad category. There’s just a couple hundred years between “art” as the production of artisanal objects that had a deeply ingrained social function (Roman sculpture, nobility portraits, religious art) and art for art’s sake or modernism, where it turns in on itself. J Ribas: All of your examples are of highly mediated forms, which predate any clear articulation of themselves as “art” proper; that is, something made by an artist within the subjectivity that you rightly historicized. Rather, these things were subjected to a high degree of dramaturgical emphasis—to an actual rhetoric of display which rigidly positioned their value as objects, both within an economy of desire as well as within relations of power and knowledge. Modernism, in its more normative offshoots, simply took “autonomy” as its own specific frame, which is, of course, itself produced through an entire order of interpretation through exhibitions and institutions. One of the things the debate about the nature of curatorial mediation often doesn’t take into consideration is the extent to which the display of artworks has affected the production and the formation of meaning around them. There are specific historical examples: say, the Entartete Kunst show in 1937, or Harald Szeemann’s Attitudes exhibition…that is, exhibitions and institutions of display shaping the actual valuation of objects, producing an order of knowledge as values and ideals. To your examples, one can add the logical conclusion of the history of discrete sculpture as installation impossible to conceive without institutional architecture and the production of meaning through exhibitions—a basic ordering of objects in spatial terms to produce or elicit meaning from them. Rather, the very subjectivity of the artist is privileged as something reified, much as commodity fetishism dictates that an artwork has intrinsic value that needs no interpretation.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Public Sculpture Tackle or
 Confronting Culture (Beuys), 2007; silver gelatin print;
15 x 15 inches; courtesy the artists

M Smith: Those are significant examples. It would seem that knowing this, the best solution would be the development of a more reflexive and cognizant (and transparent) curatorial practice rather than a diluted one. In other words, it seems to call for a much more involved relationship between artist and curator. J Ribas: An emphasis on mediation itself as integral to the production of meaning… M Smith: The points you bring up tend to apply to institutions and structures rather than individuals. And I think that’s right on because these things, whether the museum, the white cube, display or whatever, are not the kinds of things that we can take for granted or theorize our way out of as easily as people sometimes think. They are very real, hardened aspects of our relationship to art and the fact is, the vast majority of the audience will not have a particularly critical relationship to them. Some artists do an incredible job on their own, but the best projects and exhibitions that deal directly with these issues usually involve a very engaged curator, or else—all too often—you’re back at simple recoupment. J Ribas: But there is a paradox here too. The curator, unlike the artist, lacks the ability to transform “non-art” into art merely through the act of display—that level of ontology resides only in the labor of the artist. Yet, transformation seems to only happen precisely through this labor being placed in the exhibition context. And there are, of course, artists for whom the curatorial mediation is already internalized in their own practice…in a sense, the work already presupposes the idea of an “intrusion,” as in a general shift from object to process to discursive and relational approaches in the last three decades…you can argue that someone like Duchamp, for example, collapsed this distinction in the first place. M Smith: But it’s important to remember that not all artists are interested in engaging this problem, in which case the curator needs to negotiate that for them and their work to some degree or else we’re falling back into the same old traps. I think art’s biggest potential is in its ability to produce ideas beyond the ideas contained within it, or the intended ideas, etc. A good curator can harness and direct those types of discursive potentials.

Yoshua Okón, Coyotería, 2003; digital video;
dimensions variable; courtesy the artist

J Ribas: It’s fascinating to see how wildly things can fluctuate in those terms, historically speaking. Take for example Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation, a fifteenth-century painting that’s been interpreted as everything from a political allegory to a dynastic celebration—even as a clue to a murder—all within the life of the same, small, restrained composition, and shaped by every written description, as well as by every way it’s been cared for. And it’s fascinating to think about the difference in how visual art was written about before the assumed presence of diapositive reproductions. I wonder if part of the problem is really that the issue is so individualized—I mean, in the broader collective sense of meaning that can be articulated by curatorial frames…say, allegorical meaning. Hang a seventeenth-century Dutch still life next to a Morandi, or a Léger next to a Lichtenstein, and you move things in a specific direction. M Smith: They’re like a sort of super-viewer. They can start the conversation—or one of the conversations—which is then immediately in the hands of others (viewers, writers, talkers). Which is great. There are so many more points of intensity that way. We were talking once about this notion of care, of curare. When a work is not about the direct engagement of these issues, there really is a lot of care that needs to be taken. Can you interpret that for me? J Ribas: The issue of “care” is at the origin of the curator…literally, from curare, “to care of.” The Latin origin of the term is an official in charge of public works—in the sense of sanitation and roads, etc. This becomes ecclesiastic in the Middle Ages, but the idea remains someone who takes care of something, whether a road or a soul. In this sense, the question we’ve been skirting around is whether this care should extend to the issue of intention or to a critique of immanent value, which is often what people mean in terms of what I call “zero degree.” M Smith: And a bit of a thorny question at that. Personally, I tend to think art is at its most interesting when intention falls prey, so to speak, to all the different influences at play once the work enters circulation. I think that a sort of collective mutability is generally going to produce a lot more interesting ideas and trajectories than a single “intention” in a puristic sense. It’s because of the cliché that art “takes on a life of its own” that a lot of stuff starts to happen amongst people who haven’t even seen the work or saw it in reproduction. There are suddenly so many more nodes and mutations and rupture points. So no, given all that, I don’t think a curator—or anyone else for that matter—necessarily has to respect an artist’s intention. What we’re really discussing is what is supposed to happen to an artwork after it’s been made and exhibited, and what is supposed to happen to an idea—and whether there are ideal conditions for its circulation. And suddenly we’re talking as much about what an artist is—or does—as much as we are about the role of a curator.

-Rachael