A curatorial perspective on biennials and communities<\/strong><\/p>\nWhen the MDE11 took a \u201cpedagogical turn\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2018linguas franca\u2019 of the art world. There is something rather subversive in opening up the proverbial Pandora\u2019s Box because biennials are expensive and, more often than not, their effects must be quantified.<\/p>\n
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 The resurgent discussion on curating as Institutional Critique seems outdated to me.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 \u2018only\u2019 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\u2019t win in this either\/or situation is because you\u2019re not meant to.<\/p>\n
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 \u201ccuratorial paradigm\u201d to organize the entire event (2).<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
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\u2019s daily lives. This essential and uncomfortable fact cannot be ignored. To put it in Steven Wright\u2019s words: \u201cone of the most enfeebling accusations with which art is often, implicitly or explicitly, targeted: that it\u2019s not for real; or to put it bluntly, that it\u2019s just art.\u201d (4)\u00a0 As long as the funding is there, the art world is in no rush to address such complications.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
This larger concern can\u2019t 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 \u201890s, 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cPublic\u201d or \u201cArt\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
When Grant Kester speaks of artists working within \u201cpolitically coherent communities,\u201d 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).\u00a0 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 \u2018corporaciones\u2019 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 \u201cideal speech situations\u201d where open dialogue can happen – where teaching and learning takes place, where those invited, and those hosting, were encouraged to do both (6).\u00a0 It was important to not reinvent the wheel for the sake of the \u201cnew\u201d.<\/p>\n
The fact that these sites of exchange, however temporary, are also central to Habermas\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
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.
\n<\/p>\n
Theory of the self and community <\/strong><\/p>\nCommunity as a concept is so lamented in Western theory that even discussing it here feels like opening another Pandora\u2019s Box. When Friedrich Schiller first published The Aesthetic Education of Man in 1794 he was lamenting the social alienation that came with the violence and emerging capital-democratic revolutions in France. His notion that aesthetic education could set humanity free is, to a great extent, still with us today. Terms he coined, such as the play-drive or the aesthetic impulse, have helped individualize the process of self-awareness and development. In Schiller\u2019s world – and others like Emmanuel Kant whom he borrowed liberally from – it\u2019s the singular, the individual that through reason must find him\/her self. The idea that art and education, and more specifically aesthetic education, is tied to freedom is still a central argument for art\u2019s inherent qualities. It\u2019s the reason why museums fancy themselves educational institutions. It\u2019s also the reason why art is taken seriously as an area of humanistic study and why, above all else, art is still at its very core an endeavor in pedagogical study and labor.<\/p>\n
In Schiller\u2019s time, on the heels of the French Revolution, the notion of the self was still in development and since a \u201cpublic\u201d – our modern understanding of public – can only exist as a collection of autonomous and individual selves, we see that the two ideas were intrinsically tied and are born together from the same set of emancipatory preoccupations. But Schiller\u2019s conditions are not ours. He lived at a time when the self was subject to someone else – a monarchy – and a king\u2019s subject cannot be one\u2019s own. Centuries later, individuality isn\u2019t under threat. Today we have a quite a different problem. One only has to consider the current social, economic and ecological urgencies, and those yet to come, to realize that we will be required to radically re-think our game plan. Are there sites where art can make a difference?<\/p>\n
Where we take the art world and its priorities, and where it will take us, will continue to be intensely debated. It will have to come to terms with its post \u201868 disillusionment, look outside its euro-centric borders, reconsider its neo-liberal policies that act as a sort of qualitative gatekeeper, and rethink its entrenched apprehensions of speaking in terms of \u201cwe.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is a difference between this historic, but now universalized, European notion that one owns consciousness individually and alone, as opposed to the notion that one begins a \u201cprocess\u201d of consciousness, as in consciousness building with others. How one goes about understanding these concepts depends on a lot of things, and we don\u2019t want to create an either\/or dialectic. What\u2019s clear is that our understanding of art today is, and has been, greatly impacted by those ideals developed centuries ago. The dream of the autonomous self is as complicated by today\u2019s world as the autonomous object of art and understanding and unraveling that individualistic paradigm will require some work.<\/p>\n
Either in Habermas\u2019 case when he speaks of ideal speech situations or when contemporary thinkers like Enrique Dussel discuss the idea that citizens have a stake in their \u201cobediential\u201d system of government and power because it ultimately is born from them, they are talking about having a stake in how we collectively form, and have formed, systems of organizing ourselves (7). Habermas cites this originary transformation in Europe, Dussel speaks from a Latin American perspective, but what is important here is that this line of thinking is a legitimization of community decision making, at the theoretical level, and it allows artists and others to begin to think of their labor in dialogue with a larger structure of social and cultural work in politics.<\/p>\n
This reflection should not be confused as a \u201ccall to arms\u201d but rather a recognition that artistic processes that begin to question how and why we collaborate as communities and individuals is already taking place. As noted earlier, the art world is a wide-open space where many things can happen. Artists working in a collaborative method should be able to practice alongside artists working in their studios. This is not an either\/or situation. The fact that collaborative and community driven processes, many found in Medellin and elsewhere, are only just now finding their way into the discursive paradigm of art and theory, should be embraced and seen as a teaching and learning opportunity \u2013 to consider the re-constitution of a civic space and identity, a learning, a re-learning and consciousness building process that is fundamental to this kind of work and its larger cultural project.<\/p>\n
How one taps into this kind of creative work is where curatorial methodologies come into play.
\nBeing aware of what the city of Medellin could give us requires a sustained form of research that isn\u2019t easy to maintain in this kind of platform, where one is working outside the host city for a great deal of the planning period. This focus on time and a sustained presence is not without its demands. Apart from the practical difficulties this implies, it also requires us to question Modernity\u2019s focus on and privileging of \u201cideas\u201d as an artistic act in and of itself – art as idea as idea. Ideas can be easy to come by and conceptualism\u2019s staying power, despite the brevity of many of its gestures, is testament to the facility with which the art world\u2019s economy, turns over new ideas and new works of art with blazing speed. It certainly can be argued that today this conceptual privilege of the \u201cnew idea\u201d has more to do with a certain \u201centrepreneurial\u201d spirit that we misguidedly value above all else (8). Not coincidentally, this \u201centrepreneurial\u201d mind-set, requires a skill-set perfectly matched for curatorial work, banking its future on conducting research, managing data, and producing new bits of information.<\/p>\n
A related inquiry, is the history of the curatorial act as a \u201cgesture\u201d – a model inherited from Modernism\u2019s affinity for the speech act and the artistic enunciation as a linguistic metaphor. A more appropriate response would be a move towards a focus on listening. Apart from requiring more time, being present requires a variety of different skill-sets we will invariably have to learn once again from artists – and that\u2019s the way it should be. As curators we must always remember, despite our ever-growing presence, that our curatorial methodologies have to be aligned with the artists we work with. Despite the institutional and professional challenges this may imply, it cannot be any other way.
\n<\/p>\n
Reflections on the MDE11 and its structure<\/strong><\/p>\nWhen asked to be a part of this curatorial team I was looking forward to the opportunity to work with such a talented group of people both within and without the museum. Artists, writers, teachers, administrators, organizers, all have played an important role in shaping the MDE11. As a curatorial group, our varied experiences and backgrounds created a dynamic balance of ideas and proposals.<\/p>\n
When we began the discussions two years ago of how we wanted to define the MDE11, it became clear that certain aspects and relationships from the MDE07 had to stay. The Espacios Anfitriones program, for example was a success in that it generated a network of collaboration amongst independent art spaces in South America that is still active today. Other elements weren\u2019t as appropriate for this version as we focused on learning and pedagogy. So we set about organizing a three-part structure (Laboratorio, Estudio, Exposici\u00f3n) that gave us the freedom to build-off and develop these three central categories.<\/p>\n
An important consideration, given our varied curatorial backgrounds, was that we didn\u2019t want to create an oppositional dialectic that positioned one kind of practice or methodology against another. This would not have been useful to anyone and art is a big enough camp to accommodate them all. What we wanted was to carve out a space where the theme of \u201cteaching and learning\u201d could be considered from various perspectives. We also wanted to push the pedagogical metaphor as far as possible through exhibition formats (Taller Central), extended research proposals in the city (Trabajo de Campo), experimental collaborations with other organizations (Interlocuciones), and lectures and workshops (Aula Dial\u00f3gica and Taller de Construcci\u00f3n). Through this structure we could move away from the either\/or ghetto and begin to think about what one form of work could learn from another. An investigation in one area of the MDE11 was encouraged to find its way into other areas and formats of working. For example, a concept that drives a project in the exhibition is also investigated in a panel discussion, it is then a point of inquiry for artists in the city, and later a strategy shared with collaborators that then gets presented back to the public for discussion, and the cycle goes on…<\/p>\n
As I see it, the MDE11 as previously mentioned, had to be based both conceptually and curatorially on local artistic methodologies taking into consideration how pedagogy was being practiced and redefined everyday here in Medellin. The topic might be universal, but its form and content is not. One of the critiques of Relational Aesthetics is that it isn\u2019t critical of the post-fordist informational and sociability economy – how it feeds into the way our very relationships are being marketed back to us – sociability as a medium or a field of capital investment. From my perspective, one of the reasons this critique has taken hold so strongly is that many art organizations and events have followed suit in riding the \u201csociability\u201d wave. This is partly the reason that public practices (many of them working out a counter-logic to this marketed-sociability template) have gotten the global art circuit\u2019s attention. It\u2019s also one of the many reasons why the MDE11 needed to take a clear position on what it was trying to achieve.<\/p>\n
Local practices, tempered by what the curatorial team brought to the city, gave the MDE11 its form and content. By doing so we didn\u2019t confuse representations of the social for the haptic work being done by artists to generate new social fabrics. We found a place for numerous methodologies to dialogue, understanding that artists work in different ways. Given the multiple factors at play, I think the MDE11 found some synergy. We formed relationships with a wealth of willing collaborators who, given their day-to-day work in the practice of teaching and learning, were immensely generous. I hope they took away as much from these exchanges and the MDE11, as I have from working with them over the past two years.<\/p>\n
It seems clear to me that their work was as much about things the art world could openly and confidently debate as it was about things it has very real problems discussing – from art\u2019s role in remaking civic discourses and art as a site for re-modeling nonviolent forms of consciousness building to inquiries into the city\u2019s educational infrastructure and its pedagogical traditions and histories.<\/p>\n
Working with multiple organizations and actors in a city is not easy. There are have been failures and missed opportunities, false starts and several mid-stream adjustments. There were numerous meetings with municipal civil servants and heads of various organizations – too many to count. I made it a priority to meet as many artist-run corporaciones as I could during our intensely scheduled visits to the city.<\/p>\n
As a curatorial team, we considered and discussed many ideas. We debated the role of the archive, both lost and established, the materiality of learning, as well as the role of performance, libraries and the academy. Projects are planned all over the city and we\u2019ve invited theorists and artists from Medellin and elsewhere to expand on these topics and fill in the numerous gaps. Everything was, and is still, up for discussion. By that I mean that our curatorial position, and the MDE11 as a whole, took Paulo Freire\u2019s idea to heart: everyplace is a site for learning and everyone is both a teacher and a student.<\/p>\n
Footnotes<\/strong><\/p>\n1. The MDE11 is purposely not a biennial as it attempted to challenge certain biennial structures. One very important distinction was the extension of the event. Its first, and more recent iteration, the MDE07, lasted almost six months. My point is not to approximate or use them interchangeably but to highlight certain challenges that still exist among similar formats.<\/p>\n
2. Olga Fernandez. \u201cJust What is it That Makes \u2018Curating\u2019 so Different, so Appealing?\u201d OnCurating.org 08\/11 (2011) 40. http:\/\/www.on-curating.org\/issue_08.html<\/p>\n
3. Michael Brenson. Acts of engagement: writings on art, criticism, and institutions, 1993-2002\u202c. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).\u202c<\/p>\n
4. Stephen Wright. \u201cThe Future of the Reciprocal Readymade: An Essay on Use-Value and Art-Related Practice\u201d 16 Beaver (2005) http:\/\/www.16beavergroup.org\/monday\/archives\/001496.php<\/p>\n
5. Grant Kester. Conversation Pieces. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004).<\/p>\n
6. J\u00fcrgen Habermas. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991).<\/p>\n
7. Enrique Dussel. Twenty Theses on Politics (Latin America in Translation). (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2008).<\/p>\n
8. Ultra-red, \u201cArt, Collectivity, and Pedagogy: Changing the World in which we Live,\u201d Chto Delat 08-32 (2011): 16. http:\/\/www.chtodelat.org\/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=234&Itemid=414&lang=en<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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