Curatorial Intervention by Brett M. Levine

Author:Brett M. Levine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: undefined
Published: 2012-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

What if one were to map these shifts? They would move from intention and reception through intervention as allusion, to intervention as possibility, to intervention as positive operation. And yet, these shifts occur without any external referent. The problematics that arise are not just revealed in curatorial intervention’s operation, but also through its (in)visibility. This is a significant distinction to draw in part because the roles curators play in facilitating the realization of works can be of immeasurable value. Think, for example, of organizations such as the Public Art Fund in New York or Sydney’s John Kaldor Public Art Projects. These organizations are renowned funding organizations with renowned curators working tirelessly to facilitate major projects: in New York, first Nicholas Baume, then Suzy Delvalle, served artists’ interests. If one applies Seeto’s model above, what results is a positive model of intervention, one that is grounded in the role of fostering opportunities.

Still, curatorial intervention and its operations are as elusive as they are elastic. For curatorial intervention to be comprehensively interrogated, both the function and framework of the curator must be considered. Curatorial intervention is one extension of this function. Function—the defining set of rules and practices that situate curating—contextualizes intervention, shifting any analysis of intervention from a simple yes or no judgment to interrogations of “how, when, and why.” If a pronouncement on curatorial intervention were as simple as evaluating action, capable of being answered in the negative or the affirmative to questions such as “Have you done this?” then the operation of curatorial intervention would be of limited significance. Instead, time and again artists

experience the curator, and by extension the museum/institution, as an active participant in previously diametric and dialectic relationships between artist and audience.

As significantly, curatorial intervention is not defined by a single mode of operation. Instead, it can emerge across multiple aspects of curatorial practice, each with unique implications. First, at times there can be the impression that curatorial constructs can operate in parallel with intentionality. This potential emerges in statements by curators such as Gaskell, above, who spoke of betrayed intentions, “multivalency,” and allaying “fears that irreparable harm is being done.”[11] In a multivalent approach, both artist and artwork become objectified. Each may be contextualized within changing intellectual frameworks and inserted variously into contexts constructed by curators. Both artist and object are at the service of the curator’s intellectual, critical, social, cultural, and philosophical constructions, albeit with the caveat that no “irreparable harm” be done.[12] This notion of “irreparable harm” suggests that Gaskell perceives the viewing experience to be detached from the art object. Otherwise, audiences would attach specific meanings to the works they see, and contextualizing a work outside its intended meaning would likely cause irreparable harm. In Gaskell’s model, audience experience exists somewhere between flash blindness and residual memory: the impact of the misrepresented work will fade, its decontextualization of little lasting impact, leaving only the ever-fading aftereffect that situated the object’s reception somewhere unintended. One might argue that this is wholly interventionist.

An alternative—though

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