Bill Kelley, Jr. co-curator MDE11
The MDE11 is an opportunity to make a simple yet assertive realignment of what a biennial or an event of this magnitude can be (1). Of course a “biennial” implies an entire team of people being on the same page and a variety of collaborating organizations willing to do their part. After two years of work that contained numerous trips to the city and countless hours conversing online with colleagues and collaborators, and now finally on the heels of its inauguration, I see the MDE11 asking certain questions about the nature and sustainability of the entire endeavor itself. This self-reflexivity is a normal outcome and a constant reminder of a healthy self-doubt that takes over when you undertake something this complex and intensely interconnected. Questioning, “who is the public?” is naturally a central inquiry for the MDE11. Given the central theme of pedagogy, and a title taken from Paulo Freire’s principle tenet on the linkage between teaching and learning, it would only be natural to start to question what are art’s pedagogical limits and possibilities. I personally think the discussion is far more fruitful if we don’t talk about art, but rather, talk about the various methodologies and communities art has at its disposal. What are artists doing now and, more specifically, what are they doing in Medellin? How can we apply this to the logic of the MDE11?
A curatorial perspective on biennials and communities
When the MDE11 took a “pedagogical turn” so to speak, meaning that the topic of its conceptual emphasis started to be developed around research, education and knowledge, it became clear that Medellin had much to offer to the conversation. I understood that, from the beginning, to impose other regional intellectual trajectories, however radical they might seem elsewhere, would be a mistake. Imported or translated discourses were no match, and they would have to be framed through and in dialogue with the contextual filter of Medellin, its history and cultural practices.
That is no easy task given the pressure we, as international curators, face in being invited to organize such events. The role of the floating, desk-less curator has been much discussed but rarely is it ever challenged as one that continually magnifies and promulgates the established ‘linguas franca’ of the art world. There is something rather subversive in opening up the proverbial Pandora’s Box because biennials are expensive and, more often than not, their effects must be quantified.
The role of the curator has been so-often discussed that it almost feels redundant to bring it up. The resurgent discussion on curating as Institutional Critique seems outdated to me. Very little can be learned from formats and inquiries that are made to lead you back to where you started. By this, I mean that the role of the curator was defined within a certain paradigm of art and aesthetic theory, that we all know, can be critical ‘only’ up to a certain point. Yet on the other hand, the critique and fear of the institution as some contaminating zone of influence speaks to a kind of conceptual purity, a return to pure autonomy, that has no place in the world today. The reason you can’t win in this either/or situation is because you’re not meant to.
Public practices, relational art, dialogical processes and the like, seem to be gaining momentum and attention and one can certainly make the case, as others have done, that biennials have played an important role in creating a platform. This is partly true. Yes, the biennial is nimble and temporary and it allows for curatorial structures to potentially be more experimental. The inherent local vs global nature of its context – at once situated in a city while simultaneously belonging to a global circuit – instantly allows it to create tensions that bring both sides into play while allowing its temporality to set its own limits on what can be done and how much it will cost. But this traditional model also comes at a price. Local communities are rarely engaged on their terms – terms that require a sustained presence and an invested discourse. Curatorial strategies become formulaic, more interested in translating international projects, safely tucked into the fold of some sort of biennial canon while the museums/institutions that host them are equally pressed to bring, what one might call, a “curatorial paradigm” to organize the entire event (2).
At a time when artists have moved away from accepting the authorial position within their own works of art, the curator has become increasingly present in authoring biennials and other forms of cultural events. The fact that curators, like ourselves, spend as much time thinking and writing about curating as we do about art making, speaks to a blurring of roles and certain self-reflection that is required to do the job. Despite the curator being seen as a mediator between the institution and the public, or even art and the public, it is the curatorial mission that gives biennials their emotional and intellectual weight (3).
Biennial formats are still very popular, they reach an increasing number of people and show no sign of decline, but the actuality remains that art (or at least the mainstream version of it) remains outside the purview of what is deemed important in people’s daily lives. This essential and uncomfortable fact cannot be ignored. To put it in Steven Wright’s words: “one of the most enfeebling accusations with which art is often, implicitly or explicitly, targeted: that it’s not for real; or to put it bluntly, that it’s just art.” (4) As long as the funding is there, the art world is in no rush to address such complications.
This text is not the space to critique the global marketplace, Kantian hermeneutics or begin to describe how this came to be or why we constantly have to defend art as a worthwhile pedagogical investment. What I hope to concern myself with is raising certain questions about what we can do in a site like the MDE11. What is our role here, really? The question is: can we use what’s given to us in this format while using the opportunity to address an ossified system that has self-constructed and regulated the field of critique at a meta level? If we are to take this situation seriously then, at the very least, the form and content of curatorial mediation should begin to be questioned.
This larger concern can’t be disconnected from the bigger cultural shifts we see happening around us or the contexts and terms in which we currently work. Given the border-less nature in which many biennial curators work, those terms are often transnational. Platforms for art making that make the pedagogical a central aim are being formed daily around the world while at the same time institutions of education are being dis-invested and neo-liberalized beyond anything our parents would recognize, particularly in my country. The capitalist excesses of the ‘90s, and their subsequent and inevitable crises, reinvigorated many artists to form collective groups that began anew to question the role of art and politics. While technology has brought on considerations on the malleability of the consumer as producer, one also has to question to what extent technology is able to shape new forms of community. The list of considerations is immense.
Medellin must contend with the same list while it also writes and re-writes its own tragic and hopeful history. The results of which can be seen in the richness and diversity of current artistic proposals, many of which are engaged with the MDE11. Projects ranging from community theater groups greatly enriched by the pedagogical trajectories of Agosto Boal and Paulo Freire, or collaborative video and film collectives engaged in memory recuperation projects, a massive network of formal and informal learning centers, music schools and urban study centers dot the map of the city. This list is equally immense. The challenge here was not to vaguely center our proposal within a general understanding of “Public” or “Art” but rather to assist in building a structure, as curatorial guests of the city, to inquire, give feedback and enrich on the teaching and learning already happening; to situate these local practices in dialogue with concerns and ideas from other sites of cultural work.
When Grant Kester speaks of artists working within “politically coherent communities,” he is pointing out how they problem-solve issues on local levels of interaction and communication with communities already invested and in their own context (5). The Museo de Antioquia, the hosting venue of the MDE11, has similar programs promoting contextual practices though a series of initiatives. The Museo Itinerante frames the logic and the meaning of the art object within specific neighborhoods. The numerous artist-run ‘corporaciones’ in Medellin have been busy operating in specific areas of the city working in video, theater or music, and have developed long-standing relationships with their community. The network of parque-bibliotecas have equally well-established relationships with local community groups and artists. We, as curators needed to create a structure that built-off of what was already there and to create moments of what Habermas called “ideal speech situations” where open dialogue can happen – where teaching and learning takes place, where those invited, and those hosting, were encouraged to do both (6). It was important to not reinvent the wheel for the sake of the “new”.
The fact that these sites of exchange, however temporary, are also central to Habermas’ theory of how public and civic space is developed is no coincidence. It is also no coincidence that Medellin has been an important site where these kinds of projects develop. The reasons for this are too extensive to be drawn out here, but needless to say, the process of memory recuperation and civic re-identification are not undertakings reserved for any particular kind of person. Artistic efforts are undertaken in various media and in any number of settings. The crisscrossing of disciplines, media, vocations, and knowledge is not so much an assault on art, as it is a survival tactic in a region that needed to address such issues.
Public practices and collaborative methodologies have allowed us a space for revaluation. And though they have been with us for quite some time, many more artists are investigating new ways to engage public spaces and communities and at a pace that was not foreseeable a decade ago. Many projects ground themselves within experimental trans-disciplinary practices that question our tentative and uneasy relationship we, in the art world, have with expanding the parameters of aesthetic theory. Understandably, for many of us, this brings up certain ghosts from the past while the risk of losing art to some other discipline keeps hard lines drawn in the sand.
Sending data...
