Hi CRUMB-ers,

I have been lurking on the list for a few weeks, and it's very exciting to
read everyone's comments since serious discussion of art, activism, and
community is pretty threadbare both in the region where I work and the other
new media art discussion lists and resources I've been looking at
recently...

I feel a real affinity with some of Tim Brennan's comments about curating as
performance, and also with Sarah Cook's comments:

>A word that has come up often this weekend in Bristol is "catalyst" as that
is
>common whether you act as a curator, a producer, an agent or a broker of
new
>media work.

>Activist art in particular aside, part of the discussion around
small-organisation models of >curating/production in the new media world at
Momentum has focussed on the topic of interactivity >and collaboration --
where partners in the project are "mutually influential" - and it's clear
who is >the partner exchanging knowledge and skills, rather than who is the
client providing services. >Perhaps if we think in a more concrete manner
about being "mutually influential" in regards to >activist-based art we
might get a little further...

I'm an artist, but a year ago I also began working at a small art museum
where I was recently re-appointed as curator of new media. This has been
sort of problematic, weird, and good at the same time (for lack of a more
articulate way to put it...). I consider curatorial activities part of my
artmaking practice and my role to be that of catalyzing activity and
curating processes as opposed to discrete works of art or art-as-objects. I
feel more comfortable when my relationship to other artists in the
production/presentation of work/actions is collaborative and centers around
dialogue. Other curatorial models often seem to carry an implicit
hierarchical relationship, which for reasons already discussed on this list,
seems at odds with the emphasis on process and exchange in community-based
or activist art. But trying to work like this from inside a traditional art
institution (that still doesn't fully understand the dynamics of new media
art/art on the net) is also very complicated.

I would be really interested in hearing from other artist/curators,
especially those that work within museums or other art institutions, to see
how they handle shifting or combining their roles. How do others feel about
making the space between their artmaking/curatorial practice more seamless?
Should it be? How do you handle those "Well, if it was just me, we'd be
doing it like this, but it's me working in the museum, so..." situations?

I would also be really interested in hearing more discussion about Sarah
Cook's "question about the assumption of audience." I agree with her
statement that "more likely they write the text to further research and
knowledge about the work, and to justify why they've put it there. And if a
museum is a place to go to learn about art, why shouldn't there be as part
of that experience somewhere to get more information about the art and the
artist?" As an artist, I feel that it can be dangerous to presume both 1)
that your audience will automatically recognize, understand, or engage with
the work and that 2) audiences will only engage with works through didactic
models building from the intention to explain what the work is "about." One
thing that I do think is positive about museum practice is the educational
programs and materials that accompany exhibitions; as an artist I have
thought a lot about incorporating this into my projects.

Where this becomes problematic might be identified in the language normally
used to describe these curator/institution-generated texts--didactics and
interpretive materials. I'm just sort of thinking aloud here, but both terms
also seem to reinforce a hierarchical relationship between curator/museum
and audience by privileging the institution as "broadcasters" of
information. Information about art and the artist is taught to or
interpreted for a passive viewer, whereas a more dynamic model might instead
use dialogue to build on the audience's own experience as a way to negotiate
meaning. I think this might be more appropriate to the more slippery,
temporal nature of web-based activist work and non-object-oriented work in
general.

Feedback! Please!


Denise Delgado
Curator of New Media
Bass Museum of Art
2121 Park Avenue
Miami Beach, FL 33139
t 305.673.7530
f 305.673.7062
http://www.bassmuseum.org