Not a Curatorial Statement
Posted on August 21st, 2010 in musings and tagged action, art, curating, manifesta8, theory
We were confronted by a loss of faith, a lack of meaning in things that we did, that we invested all of this time and energy and resources into. We felt that art was always instrumentalized to further the agendas of others. We felt trapped, centripetally pulled into a cyclical space of crisis, anger, and confusion. We kept spinning around and around…
Behind every corner, in every headline, underlying every panel discussion and infused in every officially important art exhibition, a crisis lurked. Look out! Duck! Stay sharp! You better think fast and deal. Put out that fire, or be consumed by the flames of this or that impending sociopolitical Moloch. The curatorial statement should be approximately 1500 words in length.
It made us angry. Everything’s so fucked up. There’s no way out. After all the posts-this and -that we’re left with the same old totalizing hegemony, the monolith of neoliberalism. Always banging our heads against it, doing the dance, going through the motions of being “critical.” We asked the “right” questions of the “right” people and they gave us the “right” answers. Impeccable performances every time. The opening was a ripping party.
We were confused. It didn’t seem to get us anywhere — the right questions and the right answers. Nothing changed. Same old criticality, different venue. We couldn’t get organized, couldn’t get clear, no time to reflect, to strategize…
Meantime, we had another crisis to deal with. Back at it. Where’s the thing this time? Istanbul? Berlin? Sao Paolo? See you next year at the fair. Did ya hear? The ultra-nationalists won another handful of seats in Parliament. Or was it the Congress? Europe’s fucked, man. These guys just hate immigrants. There’s an Egyptian artist I saw at the last one — made this project where he reimagined some department store chain as an Arab souq. No shit. We should propose a project about that… I know some artists from South Africa that live between New York and Brussels.
Stilled pissed off. That exhibition of political art got panned in the critical journals. The popular press ignored it. The Right continued to dominate the debate with racist diatribes. The Left shouted weak neoliberal platitudes bathed in the worn rhetoric of socialism. The next day another dozen exhibition announcements came through E-FLUX, all variations on the same theme. Same old criticality, different venues. What are we doing? Career’s going great, though. See the news about the earthquake in Haiti? I saw this artist from Haiti in the last biennale…
