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© Janna Graham & Michelle Jacques, 2005. Used by permission
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Aestheticizing Relationships or... Which comes first, the relational or the aesthetics?
by Janna Graham & Michelle Jacques
Date: 02 December 2005
Event: Toronto
Janna Graham
Janna Graham is manager of community programs at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, where she has developed collaborative and participatory programming with artists and cultural and community organizers since 1999. These initiatives include Teens Behind the Scenes; an annual artists in residence program; and ArtsAccess, an inter-regional, gallery-initiated community arts initiative. Janna received her MA from the Department of Fine Art at Leeds University, is an editor, board member and contributor to FUSE and has worked on independent writing, curatorial and education projects with Mercer Union, Art Metropole (Toronto), Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff), Centre CATH (Leeds, UK) and 16 Beaver (New York). Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture, the Journal of Cultural Studies and will appear in the forthcoming publication Museums After Modernism, edited by Griselda Pollock and Joyce Zemans.
Michelle Jacques
Michelle Jacques is assistant curator, contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, where recent projects include exhibitions of the work of Luis Jacob, Kori Newkirk, and Jennifer Steinkamp. She is a member of the board and editorial committee of FUSE, a Toronto-based magazine that explores politically-engaged art practices and issues, and she is also a board member at Mercer Union, A Centre for Contemporary Art. During a recent sabbatical from the AGO, Jacques resided in Halifax, where she held the position of director of programming at the Centre for Art Tapes (CFAT). She has an extensive history working with artist-run centres in Toronto, and has collaborated with Gallery TPW, V tape and Interaccess Electronic Media Arts Centre. She holds a B.A. in Art History and Psychology from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, and an M.A. in Art History from York University, Toronto.
Abstract
Drawing from our experiences as a museum educator and museum curator who have worked together closely on several projects, we will examine the historical circumstances and current status of relational activity through the lens of public institutional practitioners, who struggle to make meaningful connections between objects, artists and audience.
We will assess the histories of museum education and relational aesthetics, considering the potential of each to achieve compelling aesthetic effects on the one hand, and to engage audiences in a meaningful and consequential way on the other. This assessment will encompass a charting of the evolution of the institutional curator and educator in Euro-Western Art Museums. We will examine the current status of the museum curator, which we identify as one that is in a moment of transition (or even trauma) that is marked by real tension between curatorial obligation to the collector, object and (to a lesser extent in many cases) the artist and responsibility to the audience. At the same time, we will discuss the role of the Educator in relationship to its philosophical roots in Enlightenment thought and its current crossover with the work of artists engaged in relational practices (educators have been feeding people in galleries for decades!).
In the Modernist curator/collector/object/artist equation within institutions, the audience is often an abstracted fantasy (i.e. those who will be enlightened by art, those who share 'our' tastes, those for whom things need to be 'dumbed down,'). This equation is supported by current corporate modes of imagining audience as consumers, through demographic analyses, head counts, focus groups etc. In both cases, the audience is the museum's 'other'. Under these circumstances, the curator constructs (and sometimes constructs themselves as) the spectacle and the educator is brought in to engage in 'compensatory exercises' (as described by Irish curator Declan McGongagle) that bring object/artist and audience into closer relationship.
We will propose an ideal that falls somewhere between the educator, the curator, the relational artist and the audience, one that imagines the aesthetic and social consequences of relationships. In this ideal, 'audience' (although audience becomes an inadequate descriptor for this group of people, as do 'viewer,' 'visitor' and other commonly used terms) is a central focus, not as an objectified imaginary, or a formalized aesthetic, as proposed by a certain reading of Bourriaud's ideas, but as a critical agent in the communicative processes of art-making-viewing-organizing-participating. We will use examples from real and fictional art worlds, from the strategies of activist and artistic organizers, and from our own projects, to think and dream about the implications of these practices, the institutions and funders that might support them, and the larger contribution they might make to the social and artistic milieux.