Today I need to take a brief detour to examine the term ‘curate.’ I am writing with reference to the thoughts that I noted here on 15th August about a conventional gallery exhibition and how this may not be the most appropriate or interesting outcome of this blog and project. If I decide not to produce a white cube exhibition containing artworks in space as the end product for ‘Group Therapy’, have I curated an exhibition at all, or have I just organised it? Or is it in fact my artwork? AND does it matter anyway as long as the project manifests something of interest?
Luckily I am an obsessional collector of books and whenever such ponderings overtake me I can usually reach for one volume or another to begin to resolve things. On this occasion I’ve come straight to JJ Charlesworth’s essay Curating Doubt in Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance. This essay tracks the progression of curating from practice based archiving and display of objects in museums and galleries to a discourse based theoretical paradigm that generates its own creative perspectives. Charlesworth says that “curatorship can now be understood as the synthesis of institution context and artistic content- the product of an ‘artist’ rather than a curator.” He goes on to quote the warning that Paul O’Neill made in Art Monthly, on the inherent danger that “we are becoming so self-reflexive that exhibitions often end up as nothing more or less than art exhibitions curated by curators curating curators, curating artists, curating artworks, curating exhibitions.”
Over the past three years I’ve been fortunate to partner with some very unusual individuals who have blurred the boundary between the archetypical roles of artist and curator. In 2008 my work as an assistant to Hannah Hurtzig http://www.mobileacademy-berlin.com/ on Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge No 11 On WASTE: The Disappearance and Comeback of Things & Values certainly involved a process of assembling and framing a collection around a theme, although Hannah herself did not refer to this process as curatorial but as artistic. The project offered visitors the opportunity to book an appointment with an expert from various fields and to sit for a five minute conversation which would relate to the central topic: waste. The process was catalytic of conversation and functioned almost as a 3D library which users could draw on to inhabit new perspectives. I would love to find a way for Group Therapy to provide a similar discursive space, but still wish to include some conventional elements of an exhibition.
Let me also add here that buried within the multiple academic references that permeated Blackmarket No 11, I often wondered about ‘the talking cure’ or psychoanalysis as a reference. Hannah talked occasionally about friends who were taking anti-depressants or her own brief depressive experiences…. I often wished I had pushed her to talk more about this, but I was quite young back then and really quite frightened of the woman…… Have a look at the images and I am sure you will see why the low lit intimacy of these face to face conversations puts me in mind of some kind of therapy.
I have used this blog so far to talk about the work of other artists, to look at some commentaries on mental health in the media, to discuss books that I have read and to retell some of my own experiences. I am not sure if it becomes to ambitious to attempt to include all of the above in the final project, or if I ought just to be content to show artists work and accompany this with an interesting conference. Maybe that it enough for now and maybe anything more gets too close to Charlesworth’s fears around excessive curatorial complication?
By the way….. given that I am basically a massive egg head, I sometimes get excited about the most abstract of things. I nearly wet my pants earlier today when I discovered that that temple of academic sexiness The London Consortium is running an Mres short course on some of the very same topics that I am discussing on this blog. Its called Down: Melancholy, Depression and Regeneration. To be honest its more about manifestations of depression as a cultural and economic concept than a direct link between technology and mental health. But it’s close enough for me to feel that I’m working with issues that are academically vital as well as interesting to me for personal reasons. My god check out the beast of a reading list that they have given….. http://www.londonconsortium.com/courses/down.php. I think I’m basically going to have to lock myself away until I have read every book on here…..
Nah I’m only joking…… kindda…..
I’ve been going a bit nuts for the past week or so. This is often moment when I have my best ideas so I have been holding onto my hat and hoping that something good comes of it.
While sitting in my hotel room in Edinburgh on Thursday morning something about the Group Therapy show started to form in my head around the idea of research and resource. This blog has become such an interesting and useful forum for my ideas over the past three months and has provided a catalyst for really good discussions with so many artists. It almost feels that a highly polished curatorial ‘show’ as an outcome would somehow neglect to address the many open-ended questions that surround the field that I seek to engage with. I feel intuitively that to propose further questions rather than seek to provide answers might prove a more interesting process at this stage.
Having said all of this I would love to commission some new work and Hans from Ubermorgan would be the favorite at the moment. I am also still visualising video installations having a presence in some sense as I have discussed so many good ones on here. However I would really like to propose Adbusters as a partner in the project (after reading their ecopsychology addition) and work with them to curate a programme of talks and actions on the the theme of ecopsychology. A library (or web archive) is a possibility and then there is also that whole other area of how technology is being used in psychotherapy which I have not even started on yet (but intend to soon). We could bring in examples of the equipment and software being used.
God its exciting……
I think my next step might be to approach someone from the AND festival http://www.andfestival.org.uk/ as it feels to me that the 2011 festival would be the perfect context for this project to reside in. If I have their buy-in I can think about talking to Adbusters and MIND or CALM as I still really want to see if I can get a mental health charity on board in some capacity.
I need a proposal and a budget….
I think it might be admin time……
I’ve been intending to blog about Matthew De Kersaint Giraudeau http://www.dekersaint.co.uk/ for some time now, following an email exchange that had with him in June. I know he’s performing at the Royal Standard in Liverpool tonight at 7pm http://www.the-royal-standard.com/events/, so thankfully my procrastination means that the post will be ‘timely’ rather that just ‘late’.
Matthew first came to my attention via the April issue of New Art Criticism where I found his video piece “The Sadness Of Mark Speight.” It tells the tragic tale of the children’s TV presenter who took his own life in April 2008 after his girlfriend died of severe burns and a cocaine overdose. http://www.newartcriticism.co.uk/markspeight.html. What I loved about the film was its ‘youtube’ type viral video aesthetic (its made entirely from found footage), coupled with Matthew’s deadpan voiceover. Images of Mark “gurning around and generally looking enthusiastic” sit awkwardly against a disassociated commentary by the artist, that conveys minimal emotive intonation toward its subject matter. In our email conversation Matthew says:
“I’m personally interested in psychological dissociation and its implication in the possibility of a chaotic reality (the possibility that meaning and coherence are imposed on a nonsensical series of events by an incredibly powerful, fully functioning mind – the idea that normal life is a psychosis).”
There are moments of nostalgia within the narrative and an analysis of how suicide might be a difficult concept for a child to grasp, yet in essence the video unhooks tragedy from the emotive experience of grief in order to express the view of a distanced observer. In doing so it questions the usual trajectory of response and the sense of psychological order that we use to impose this, suggesting that no single mental process is more sane than the next.
The video is an outtake from a performance lecture which I have not seen, although I do believe that he is doing a performance lecture tonight at the Royal Standard. I’ll be there!
Matthew also has a series of “Psychosis Drawings” on his website which are inspired by a repetitive behavioral tendency called Stereotypy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotypy, often seen in autistic patients and children with developmental difficulties. He describes the imagery used as “paranoid hallucinations inspired by mass media.” I particularly like Networking and Coverage posted here.
The Sadness Of Mark Speight by Matthew De Kersaint Giraudeau
After my previous post on ecopsychology, I decided it was time to finally get around to watching a film called You Live In Public by Ondi Timoner. On the whole it made me want to do a digital detox (yet here I am blogging about it doh!)
The film documents the life of Josh Harris, who made his fortune during the 90s dot com boom. He used his riches to create projects that predicted the revolutionising impact of the internet on human relationships. In 2001 he and his girlfriend Tanya Corrin turned their home into a lavishly designed webcasting studio where they broadcast their entire existence online via webcam and hosted their own chat room where users could comment on the minutia of their existence. Needless to say the relationship and the experiment broke down after 81 days, when both appeared to be suffering psychological consequences from their unusual existence. Of course the project predicted the format of shows like big brother as well as the rise of surveillance culture.
The portrayal of Josh Harris feels quite indicative of a certain male archetype that we are seeing more and more in the media: lonely man with an abundance of money, technology at his finger tips and no capacity to make real relationships, who lavishes himself with obscure riches and hedonism with little regard for the feelings of others. The dot com boomers seem to be portrayed similarly to how we might understand the portrayal of rich bankers in the current media climate, greedy, hedonistic and detached from reality. I raise this because I am interested in how technology, money and power converge around specific instances of emotional and psychological disturbance.
Its clear from the film that Josh Harris had his own longstanding psychological problems stemming from a lonely childhood spent in front of the TV and its no surprise when his obsession with living publicly manifests itself in a particular kind of madness. Whats more surprising is how quickly participants in his millennium project Quiet http://post.thing.net/node/2800 started to show signs of extreme disturbance after living together for a month in a New York basement that was populated by surveillance cameras. Under constant pressure to perform for the cameras participants became distressed, depressed and startlingly hedonistic. A worrying fact when you consider how rapidly our social and digital environment is evolving to mean that we all live in public to some extent.
