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[new] Unwaged gestures- crossing the curatorial borders (Avg. Score: 3.00 / Raters: 1) (#4)
by paularoush on Mon Oct 20th, 2003 at 11:16:58 PM EURODISCORDIA TIME
(User Info) http://www.msdm.org.uk

Hi stella (thanks for the invite to participate) and hi all others! My humble thoughts on the occasion provided by this very crucial opportunity for reflection, occurred to me after visiting the Frieze art fair in London and reading the article `Curator artist - the rise of the eurocurator' by Alex Farquarson in `Art Monthly' (Sept 2003). My first point in regard to the Frieze art fair was my feeling that one of its most unusual events was a curated event (part of the listed fair's projects) which might be read as a comment on the tight economic regime put into place in Regent's Park, whose borders you might only cross at the price of £10 per head. P1 by Pawel Althamer, a camping tent situated adjacent to one of the pavillion's walls, camouflaged a a hole on the wall which provided a free passage way into the fair. The second time I went there, one of the clandestine tent users was just coming out, expelled by the fair's security staff. He would have to pay to go inside , even when using the whole on the wall and a particular problem, highlighting the absurdity of this border crossing, was that this person was unwaged and there were no concession tickets for sale at that entry!

This tent reminded me of another artistic tactic, also involving a tent, presented by the Radek community outside the National Gallery during the Prague biennale 1. The tent was the stage for a hunger strike with no demands, also part of a project curated by Marco Scotini for the exhibition. And, of course, my own participation at the same biennale - with the b+b boycott biennale - was also part of a project by curators b+b. These examples and a few others that would be possible to bring together under this same text seem to indicate that old distinctons between the various producers involved in artistic practice are critically being eroded whenever tactical collaborations emerge that make space for `points of flight' into capitalist systems underlying commercial art structures.

That this questioning of borderlines occurs within curated events, does more than simply point to the ambiguity of attempts to curate real life actions that are being imported from the socio-political sphere into artistic platforms. In his article , Alex interrogates the authorial position assumed by curators whose `conceptual premises' acquire the status of artwork. My comment, rooted on the above examples, is that there appears to be a terrain for `critical curating' as there is one for `critical art practice' and this is at its best whenever the attention is dislocated from the curators' or the artists' aesthetic theory into a more critical- philosophically and culturally minded- examination of the pragmatics of collective artistico-political interventions.

With greetings, paula roush

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