CuratorsinContext.ca

A Way of Curating

by Philip Monk

Video by Philip Monk and Emelie Chhangur

Date: 16 July 2005
Event: Banff

Abstract

What would thinking through curating be that was not a thinking through to its end - or ends - as a "clear expression" of what its ends are? What if the thinking of curating was not responsible to clear expression of these ends - not responsible to "clear expression" or responsible to ends? To what, or to whom, would it be responsible? To what time would it be responsible in the time of its ir-responsibility, which may lead away from these ends? No negativity is implied in what is a departure to another response. What would curating be (or, more properly here, the thinking of curating) that took as its perverted "principle" deviance from its supposed ends, which no longer would be in clear sight? (I put "principle" in quotation marks because this movement is a passive surrender divesting itself of the clear pursuit of any ends.)

This thinking would not be, in theory, a representation that theory sets for itself as an end for curating. It would not be, in practice, an activity that realizes the idea that theory sets for "curatorial practice." Curating would be no object of theory; curating could not theoretically define itself by identifying its "objects," those that belong to it, inherent to its own field. These "objects," of course, are not works of art but concepts, curatorial concepts, concepts curating has of itself, or gives to itself. Curating would be no "object" that speculation would throw ahead to catch up with again in a perfect symmetry of knowingness, where it would grasp what it had already put within easy reach, because the trajectory of its "identity" cannot be foreseen as a revelation of theory in practice; because the answer to its "identity" cannot be posed within the problematic of the question "what is" (What is curating?); because the divesting de-definition of curating's identity would mean a dangerous dispossession of my own.

The answer to the question "what is curating?" was already there but not as a question we pose ourselves in the arrogance of our disciplinary address. Its formulation would be otherwise: no answer but rather response to a call. The call to which it responds has already been placed to curating. Would a theory of "curatorial practice" see what was before it if the call was a beckoning it cannot see, a beckoning to what it cannot see? Who or what would place a call to curating if theory were indisposed to, or if curating was pre-disposed not to answer to theory, if the place of call - the place of calling from (a place, however, that will not identify or define the practice of curating or localize its territory) - were no place but a time - but a spectral time, as well, that could not be localized? Would theory, in the insight of its speculation, respond to this call calling curating, calling but not naming it - at least not naming it a practice, a curatorial practice?

No call forward analogous to speculation; no return call; no call waiting. The call does not come from us. It does not belong to us: we belong to it. It calls us and calls curating into being along with us, although such belonging divergently together may take place away - away from curating, as a way to curating, as a way of curating. Displaced and divergent for a time, we would only thus find ourselves as curators in the time of coming to this place, which would be no circular return of curating proper to its identity, no thing, nothing but this time. Certainly, we would be other there, otherwise there.