The Artist as Curator - Softcover

Jeffery, Celina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783203374 ISBN 13: 9781783203376

Publisher: Intellect, 2015

Synopsis

In recent years, the museum and gallery have increasingly become self-reflexive spaces, in which the relationship between art, its display, its creators and its audience is subverted and democratised. One effect of this has been a growing place for artists as curators, and in The Artist as Curator Celina Jeffery brings together a group of scholars and artists to explore the many ways that artists have introduced new curatorial ways of thinking and talking about artistic culture. Taking a deliberately multidisciplinary and cross-cultural focus, The Artist as Curator will fill a gap in museum and curatorial studies, offering a thorough and diverse treatment of various approaches to the historical and changing role of the artist as curator that should appeal to scholars, curators and artists alike.

About this title

About the Author

Celina Jeffery is an associate professor of art history at the University of Ottawa and a curator. Recent publications include Ephemeral Coast (2015), The Artist as Curator (2015), the ‘Junk Ocean’ issue of Drain: A Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture (2016) and the ‘Towards a Blue Humanity’ issue of Symploke (2019). She is the founder of Ephemeral Coast (2015–present, www.ephemeralcoast.com), a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded curatorial research project.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Artist as Curator

By Celina Jeffery

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-337-6

Contents

Acknowledgements, vii, 
Foreword, 1, 
Introduction Celina Jeffery, 5, 
Chapter 1: Paolozzi's Lost Magic Kingdoms: The Metamorphosis of Ordinary Things Nicola Levell, 15, 
Chapter 2: Re-Mastering MoMA: Kirk Varnedoe's 'Artist's Choice' Series Lewis Kachur, 45, 
Chapter 3: 'Both Object and Subject': MoMA's Burton on Brancusi Cher Krause Knight, 59, 
Chapter 4: Curating Between Worlds: How Digital Collaborations Become Curative Projects Dew Harrison, 79, 
Chapter 5: Erasure: Curator as Artist Bruce Checefsky, 97, 
Chapter 6: Say My Name Brenda L. Croft, 113, 
Chapter 7: Performing the Curator, Curating the Performer: Abramovic's Seven Easy Pieces Gregory Minissale, 131, 
Chapter 8: Curating the City: Collectioneering and the Affects of Display Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher, 149, 
Chapter 9: Artists Curating the Expedition Celina Jeffery, 173, 
Contributors, 189, 
Index, 195, 

CHAPTER 1

Paolozzi's Lost Magic Kingdoms: The Metamorphosis of Ordinary Things

Nicola Levell

Box 11: A photograph of three boys in uniform, a camera (Rank), a radio, one bicycle chain, two knives [...] two plastic beetles, one wax snail, a plastic fly [...] one metal hubcap, stripy multi-coloured umbrella, part of a road-works beacon, a plastic hand-grenade, a picture of Christ on the cross, bundle of 13 green feathers, a metal fitting, a toy plastic dagger, two plastic bananas, one toy handgun, one toy plastic space gun, one rubber toad, one rubber skeleton, ten rubber locusts, five [light] bulbs, and a small wooden box with metal clasp.

(http://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk/)

Exuding a romantic sensibility, John Keats (1994: 208) wrote of the loss of magic and the dissolution of poetry at 'the mere touch of cold philosophy'. He lamented the emergence of the empirical science of being that anatomizes mysteries; dissecting the rainbow, for instance, into a prismatic palette that is then entered into a 'dull catalogue of common things' (Keats 1994: 209). The opening citation, listing the contents of Box 11, is a museum catalogue entry for a portion of the Eduardo Paolozzi Collection that was gifted to the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery (Glasgow) in 2004. Before being catalogued and stored away, these mundane, partial and discarded objects were exhibited. They were juxtaposed with over 200 ethnographic objects from the British Museum's collections, archival photographs as well as artworks originated by the Scottish sculptor and visual artist, Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005). Configured as twelve idiosyncratic installations, they formed the touring exhibition, Lost Magic Kingdoms and Six Paper Moons of Nahuatl (1985–89).

Curated by Paolozzi, Lost Magic Kingdoms is acknowledged as the first exhibition in the United Kingdom that employed a contemporary artist as curator within the museological realm of ethnography (McLeod 1985, Malbert 1995; Pearce 1999; Shelton 2001; Schneider 2006). It marks the efflorescence of not only the ethnographic turn in contemporary art practice but also, I propose, a parallel artistic and performative turn in anthropology and ethnographic museum practice (Ames 1994; Phillips 1994; Marcus and Myers 1995; Gell 1998; Gonseth et al. 2005; Schneider and Wright 2006, 2010; González 2008; Marcus 2010). From the late 1980s onwards, contemporary artists have been intervening in and expanding the interpretative space of anthropology, its museums and ethnographic collections. Following Paolozzi, in the British context, artists include Faisal Abdu'Allah; Marina Abramovic; Maria Amidu; Ansuman Biswas; Sonia Boyce; Shirley Chubb; Godfried Donker; Chris Dorsett; Jane Grant; Romauld Hazoumé; Hew Locke; Rosanna Raymond; Joachim Schmid, amongst others (Arnold 1995; Dorsett 1995; Malbert 1995; Scruton 1995; Boyce 1995; Hilty et al. 1995; Edwards 2000; Putnam 2001; Salmond and Raymond 2008, 2010).

Despite the precedent set by Paolozzi's commission and the longevity of his exhibition, mentioned in the literature on museology, art and anthropology, Lost Magic Kingdoms has not been subject to detailed critical attention. Although its catalogue survives and provides a rich and incisive portrait of Paolozzi and his project, it clearly operates as an independent product rather than a documentary index to the exhibition concept, contents and displays. Like all catalogues, it is an eccentric space; a 'glamorizing' accessory that does not correspond to but rather proceeds and transcends the exhibitionary form, in both time and space (Harbison 2000: 153).

In this article, I examine the space between the exhibitionary form and the catalogues — the dull list, the guide and the glossy copy — and engage other agencies to explore and historicize Lost Magic Kingdoms as an idiosyncratic expression of an artist's passionate engagement as a maker and curator within the realm of anthropology. Although there has been a critical proclivity to subsume the exhibition under the interrelated categories and discourses of Primitivism and Surrealism, such a tendency overlooks its more expansive curatorial philosophy, ideas and intents. My intention, therefore, is to reveal some of the concealed or overlooked dimensions of Paolozzi's curatorial preoccupations and practice. I seek to offer another perspective on his curatorship that brings into focus his anthropological imagination; his fascination with other cultural epistemologies, values and practices; his political and ecological concerns; and his new brutalist ideals and aesthetics.

Opening: The Limits of Objectivity

Despite being attributed to Paolozzi, the conceptualization and contents of Lost Magic Kingdoms were expressions of the collaborative dynamic between the artist and Malcolm McLeod, the Keeper of Ethnography at the Museum of Mankind (the Ethnography Department of the British Museum), who commissioned the project. From the beginning of his directorship in 1974, McLeod – a passionate anthropologist and Africanist – had striven to revitalize and develop the ethnographic collections and temporary exhibitions of the Museum (Houtman 1987; Houtman 2009). He instigated an active collecting policy, largely contingent on staff area researches and field-working anthropologists. Through appointments and strategies, he nurtured the reintegration of museum work and anthropology: two practices that had grown symbiotically but radically fractured and diverged in the inter- and post-war periods in the western world (Frese 1960; Ames 1992; Shelton 1992, 2006; Bouquet 2001). With the institutionalization of anthropology in the universities and the de-privileging of material culture studies, the sub-field of museum anthropology and its objects and subjects — ethnographic collections — as well as the institution of the museum were marginalized and much maligned. Museums with ethnographic holdings were vilified in print as 'colonialist, racist, maleficent, misogynist, and even irrelevant institutions' (Kaplan 2006: 166). As the politics and processes of decolonization intensified, indigenous peoples and other groups rose to challenge the museum's authority to represent their histories and narratives. From the early 1970s onwards, both anthropology and museums moved to reflect more critically on their histories, relations and representational practices, with a view to reimagining and transforming their roles in the present (Cameron 1971; Hymes 1972; Clifford 1986; Witcomb 2003).

While Lost Magic Kingdoms was on display in London, the British Museum hosted a three-day international, interdisciplinary symposium, which focused on the politics of representational practices, Making Exhibitions of Ourselves: The Limits of Objectivity in the Representations of Other Cultures (February 1986). Like its counterpart at the Smithsonian Institution, The Poetics and Politics of Representation (1988), discussions registered the impossibility of recording or displaying 'reality' in representational forms, like exhibitions (Durrans 1988; Karp 1991; Handler 1993). It was recognized that ethnographic collections were inescapably partial and incomplete, as much an expression of the desires of the West as the expression of the material culture of other peoples. Such rethinking fractured the previously assured 'scientific' objectivity of museum anthropology and created a discursive opening for contemporary artists to enter the museological realm of ethnography and curate exhibitions.

Commission: Metaphors and Objections

Paolozzi was initially commissioned to select a number of objects from the British Museum's ethnographic collections held in store and create an installation in one display case. This small-scale curatorial project began in early 1983. But as time progressed, with numerous visits to the Museum store, accompanied by McLeod, Paolozzi became increasingly engrossed in the project. He 'mined' the museum's material culture archive, selecting a larger number of objects and a more ambitious curatorial undertaking took form. Within a two-year period, his selection had expanded to over 200 objects from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Although the exhibition was initially scheduled to run for a ten-month period, it remained at the Museum of Mankind in Burlington Gardens for two years (1985–87). Thereafter, it was toured by the South Bank Centre (January 1988–March 1989), remounted in art galleries in Swansea, Birmingham, Sheffield, York, Bolton and Leeds, in a modified form with the addition of a sixteen-page exhibition guide.

In contrast to the official catalogue, the exhibition guide provides a series of twelve numerically ordered descriptions of each installation, with a complementary black and white photographic image. These grainy images index the different genres of display and the diversity of object types, ranging from carved statues, puppets, plaster busts, papier mâché masks and rubber skeletons; through to sculptors' tools, oil lamps, radio parts and musical instruments; to plastic fruit and hand grenades, toy snails, locusts and aeroplanes, which cross-reference those commonplace things contained in Box 11. The textual descriptions, which were written by Paolozzi, are sketchy and impressionistic. They offer an insight into the eclectic themes he defined for each case. His curatorial themes included the idea of the packing case and the traffic in material things; variations on the human form; variations on animal forms; the versatility of clay; types of tools used in sculpture; the image of Africa in the artist's imagination; the colonial idea (Part 2); lost magic kingdoms or traces of other worlds through images; the Mexican Day of the Dead; the aesthetic qualities and technical virtuosity of everyday things and musical instruments and creativity.

From these varied motifs, Paolozzi (1988: n.p.) identified the theme of the packing case as the dominant organizing trope: 'The first case is based on the idea of the packing case and it serves as a metaphor for the whole exhibition [...] There's a deliberate mixture of objects in this case.' Elaborating further on the concept of the packing case, he described the way in which such containers were utilized in the transatlantic traffic and flow of material goods in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Machinery and foodstuffs were packed in wooden cases and sent from Britain to colonial territories like Africa. On arrival, these cases were emptied, repacked with local products, including ethnographic 'curios' and objects, and returned to the imperial heartland. Looking at archival images of Lost Magic Kingdoms, the visual language of display does not convincingly convey the idea of the packing case.

The installation consisted of a subjective assemblage of ethnographic objects, from disparate geographical locations, including Africa, Oceania and the Americas, which encompassed mundane and marvellous items. There were commonplace things, like an 'ugly' hide scraper; a bright blue light-bulb repurposed as a kerosene lamp; a tin-can oil lamp and a hand-made mud brick, bearing 'the impressions of its maker's fingers' (Paolozzi 1988: n.p.). These were intermixed with the curious and the exotic: a wooden bird-man from Easter Island; a cast brass voice disguiser from Nigeria; a Plains Indian beaded buckskin charm, containing a section of umbilical cord. Juxtaposed with these museum artefacts were Paolozzi's additions and creations: artworks like the papier mâché head or 'paper moon'; found objects, like the plastic snail, as well as his props of plywood, plaster, clay and metal, which figured in most of the installations. This bizarre ensemble was 'packed' or displayed on Paolozzi's wooden framework, shelves and plinths. Yet, there was no attempt to 'contain' the ethnographic objects inside the frame, to convey the idea of the packing case and the traffic in culture, as in the case of The World Mirrored: Ethnographic Collections Over The Last 150 Years (2000, Copenhagen, Denmark) or Nomads (2006, Coimbra, Portugal), with its display of authentic packing crates (2007, Porto).

Despite its oblique metaphor and its incoherent system of exotic, recycled and everyday goods, Case 1 became the dominant image of the exhibition. It was reproduced on the publicity posters and on the front cover of the catalogue. This circulated image with its Primitivist and Surrealist accents has contributed to or at least complemented the negative criticisms that perceived the exhibition as an indulgent exercise in cultural appropriation and decontextualization at the hands of a western artist (Brant 1986; Platt 1987; Napier 1992). In Foreign Bodies: Performance, Art, and Symbolic Anthropology, for example, Napier (1992: 73) reproduces the cover of the Lost Magic Kingdoms catalogue, with an extended annotation stating, '... in this exhibition at England's leading ethnographic museum, artist Eduardo Paolozzi appropriated anonymous ethnographic artifacts in the interest of creating his own collages and assemblages'. The anthropologist Tristan Platt articulated a similar criticism. In his damning review of the Museum of Mankind's Bolivian Worlds exhibition, Platt (1987: 13) scathingly refers to Lost Magic Kingdoms as 'Paolozzi's bricolage-games' commenting further that 'the aim appears to be the appropriation of mysterious meaning-fragments from afar for new aesthetic purposes defined in the metropolis'. While these accusations may have some validity, they are not supported by observations on the aesthetic form, the ethnographic and interpretative component or the curatorial intention. They merely conflate Paolozzi's curatorial and artistic practices, reducing the exhibition to an artwork or a series of collages, which precludes a discussion of the possibilities and limits of fostering interdisciplinary practices, developing different genres of exhibition and commissioning artists to curate the collections and spaces of anthropology. As Schneider (2006: 31) perceptively comments, such criticism of Lost Magic Kingdoms issuing from the academy was not only indicative of the growing self-reflexive critique of anthropology regarding its relationship with colonialism, museums and collecting, but also indicative of the discipline's 'uneasiness with contemporary art'. Equally, I would add, such negative reviews exposed the resilient antagonism between academic anthropology and applied museum-oriented anthropology (Collier and Tschopik 1954; Sturtevant 1969; Ames 1992).

Technologies and Time: Exhibition/Catalogue

In a recent move to reassess the relationship between contemporary art and anthropology, Schneider firmly locates Lost Magic Kingdoms within the discursive matrix of Primitivism. He views it as another example of a western artist appropriating and cannibalizing 'non-Western' ethnographic forms in the pursuit of their own practice (Root 1996; Flam and Deutch 2003). Schneider (2006: 31, 39) specifically singles out Paolozzi as an exemplary 'soft primitivist': an artist-curator who is above all interested in the aesthetic and 'formal affinities' of the objects, in 'emphasizing their "magic" rather than attempting any ethnographic contextualization' (Schneider 2006: 31). By invoking 'affinities' and 'magic', Schneider positions Paolozzi's exhibition in the same ideological frame as its contemporaries Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York, 1984) and Magiciens de la Terre (Paris, 1989). Yet, Paolozzi's curatorial project — his concepts, installations and texts for Lost Magic Kingdoms — was far more nebulous, eclectic, personalized and exploratory than those of William Rubin and Jean-Hubert Martin, with their respective master narratives of neo-Primitivism and universal aesthetics. Furthermore, the aesthetics and formal affinities of the ethnographic objects were not the pre-eminent criteria for Paolozzi's selection. Despite the title of his exhibition, Paolozzi was not intent on emphasizing the 'magical' properties of the objects; rather he was interested in harnessing the poetics of display to provoke critical reflections on wide-ranging issues, from cultural stereotyping, interculturality and the politics of recycling.

A significant clue to the fixing of Lost Magic Kingdoms within a soft Primitivist frame lies with the textual and visual encodings of the exhibition catalogue. In his introduction to the catalogue, Paolozzi briefly describes his early engagement with 'primitive art' in Paris and London in the 1940s, which can be readily construed as confirmation of his modern primitivist mindset. Such categorizing is to some extent reinforced by McLeod's contribution, 'Paolozzi and Identity'. McLeod (1985: 15) begins by historicizing and locating Paolozzi's work in relation to Primitivism. He aligns Paolozzi with other western artists, like Gaudier-Brzeska, Epstein, Moore, Matta and Underwood, who used the British Museum's ethnographic collection as a source of inspiration. He even mentions MoMA's Primitivism exhibition, to assert the distinctiveness of Paolozzi's project, which is the 'work in progress' of a major contemporary artist (McLeod 1985: 15). Although McLeod goes on to provide an erudite and reflexive insight into Paolozzi's critical engagement with anthropological issues and material culture (Pinney 1989), the preliminary framing of Lost Magic Kingdoms in relation to 'Primitivism' contributed to the biased view of it as another expression of modern Primitivism. A bias reinforced by the catalogue's visual register.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Artist as Curator by Celina Jeffery. Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Intellect
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783203374
• ISBN 13: 9781783203376
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 206