Curating is part of a tripartite subject -- art, art history, and art are to
be found situated, not necessarily comfortably, between the question of the art
object and that of the objectives of art. Obviously the passage between the
question of what art is and what it says, is not necessarily clear. The
relationship between these discourses actually are somewhat dysfunctional
because art resists being circumscribed by either its history or by its
interpretation. The resulting dance of approach and avoidance is the space in
which the curator functions in that they must juggle t the various discourses
that are at work. In this situation do to a failure to recognize the nature of
the field (naiveté) or ideology curators, like artists and historians fail to
recognize the limitations of their particular practice in relation to the
others. Problematically, what also comes into play is that each area of activity
has also becomes the subject of its own critical discourse demonstrating that
these practices can not be enfolded one into the other or reduced to common
ground. As such curating, like criticism seeks to exist in its own
'self-determining" system . As such, we come to recognize that art exists and
is a heterogeneous rather than homogeneous systems network. The consequence of
this proposition is that the need to develop a totalizing or unifying concept,
that would dialectically resolve all differences is discarded for one that seeks
to understand the relations between each practice is supplementary and
complimentary to the others.
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