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© Jan Allen, 2005. Used by permission
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Speaking through Silence
by Jan Allen
Date: 16 July 2005
Event: Banff
Jan Allen
Jan Allen is curator of contemporary art at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario, where she has initiated and overseen the development of numerous exhibitions since 1992. She serves as an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Art at Queen's University. Major projects include: The Female Imaginary (1994), Rx: taking our medicine (1995), Museopathy (2001) and Better Worlds (2002). Machine Life (2004) explored the aesthetics of robotic and interactive art the by electronic art pioneer Norman White and the circle of artists who have worked under his influence. Current projects, Sarindar Dhaliwal: Record Keeping (2004 - 2006) and Telling Stories, Secret Lives (2006), elaborate narrative modes of address. Allen's curatorial focus on politically astute works in digital media continues in Isabelle Hayeur: Verge (2005) and Matt Rogalsky: Ellipsis (2006). Her independent critical writing has been published in C magazine, Artext, and Poliester.
Abstract
In its eloquent staging of silence, media artist Matt Rogalsky's application of gating software to broadcast audio streams offers a metaphor for curatorial practice. Rogalsky's 2 minutes and 50 seconds of silence (for the USA), 2003 serves as a starting point for my analysis of method and effect, what I call the spectral mechanics and uncanny valleys integral to the materialization of meaning and aesthetic resonance in the art exhibition. In laying out these sets of "unspoken" dynamics underpinning curatorial practice, I raise questions about the degree to which conditions support the presentation of new forms of art, and identify some of the tensions inherent in the institutional curator's role, in order to consider the nature of curatorial contributions to culture. Within the exhibitionary complex, with its jostling of property, history and personality, spiked with conflicted yearnings for popular and critical relevance, we can think of curating as an orchestration of productive suggestion, a selective framing of associations that gain potency from the residual aura of suppressed content.
Spectral mechanics refers to the material conditions and orchestration of resources that underpin curatorial activity. These silent, if not secret, determinants are spectral in that they haunt the exhibition, suffusing it all the more powerfully for being unspoken. The curators' role as guarantor of aesthetic integrity often entails mediation of the relationship between public resources and private agendas of, for example, collectors, dealers, and sponsors, a process that conjures up the ambiguous term: curatorial terror. What are the implications for professional ethics and presumed adherence to the public trust in a setting in which entrepreneurial-style initiative is increasingly invoked? Further, what is the role of the artist and artistic community in this arena of spectral mechanics?
Within shifting rules of engagement, the curator mates enlightened self-interest with aesthetic effect. If spectral mechanics refers to the conditions surrounding exhibition production, on the other side lies the context of reception wherein measure is taken of what can be articulated, received and understood, that hot spot nestled between complacent comprehension and productive confusion. One of the tools of curatorial practice is the uncanny valley, a silent zone of apprehension that rides on the power of understatement, fear, excess or irrationality, that is, the long noted congruence of sublime response and aesthetic experience, of bafflement and wonder.
Extending the aural metaphor, I conclude my discussion with presentation of a sequence from Vision Machine's Reconstructed Speech and Re-Narration, 2004. The group's work with communities to recover - and recover from - historic trauma signals the kind of complex artistic practice that poses challenges to curatorial imagination and institutional frameworks. In this stream of artistic practice, aesthetic focus is placed on a series of gestures functioning in a reciprocal or dialogic form requiring an open-ended interpretive valence that best produces and prolongs the duration of "thinking through" or aesthetic encounter.