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Self-triangulation: Public positions guided by personal dialectics
by Ben Portis
Date: 17 July 2005
Event: Banff
Ben Portis
Ben Portis was born in 1960 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and raised in London, Ontario. At university he studied painting and sculpture, earning a BFA from Queen's in 1984 and a MFA from the University of Chicago in 1987. While living in Montreal, he first redirected his creative energies to curating, organizing Civic Visions, World's Fairs for the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 1993. In 2001 he received an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. As an independent curator he organized exhibitions on the Nihilist Spasm Band, Christian Marclay and Rachel Harrison; plus five editions of the No Music Festival from 1998 to 2004. With the Art Gallery of Ontario since 2002, Portis has organized numerous exhibitions and projects of contemporary Canadian and international artists, including David Hoffos, David Urban, Harun Farocki, Max Streicher, Neil Wedman, Eddo Stern, Christo and Jeanne-Claude and Seth, among others.
Abstract
Contemporary art curators cover tremendous ground in the name of investigation and representation (as is rightly expected of them), however the integrity of their explorations paradoxically demands a high quotient of self-style, -definition and -determination.
The complex play of subjectivity with objectivity often determines whether one makes valuable and lasting contributions. Understanding and heeding the following proposed criteria sets helps instill a clearer commitment to artists and their work at the outset and deliver a richer exhibition to visitors at the end.
Subjective considerations include:
(1) Choice - freedom to make one's own judgments and decisions
(2) Personal suitability - is this something that I can do well?
(3) Relationship to artist[s] - involvement with the ideas and concerns of another?
(4) Learning something new - am I expanding and challenging myself?
(5) Creative engagement - can I take this [art/artist/audience] somewhere it has not been before?
(6) Interpretation for self - struggling to understand
(7) Immediacy - trusting response, keeping it current
(8) Saying "yes" - building on enthusiasm
(9) Being wrong - freedom to fail.
Objective considerations include:
(1) Honesty & Integrity - facing down hidden agendas
(2) Taking stock - matching projects to the organization and its resources
(3) Relationship to peers - acknowledging prior work, respecting competition, and encouraging discourse
(4) Exclusions - staying attuned to what you don't do
(5) Measurement - forecasting benchmarks of accomplishment, timeliness and momentum
(6) Interpretation for visitors - introducing and revealing the new
(7) Sustained judgment - the temper of criticality and consultation
(8) Saying "no" - constructive denial and defense
(9) Being right - because being right only has value as it elicits agreement.
These lists are partial, probably incomplete and obviously open to debate. Despite a perceptible balance and symmetry in their formulation, they should not be considered dialectical, with a tendency towards one position or another leading closer to truth or error. Nor are these are checkmark considerations, attitudes towards which indicate consistency (or a shift) of character or conduct. Criteria of this sort reveal the currency of a given situation, especially as it may be different or unfamiliar, and provide a basis for constructive decisions with results that are founded in self-knowledge but not necessarily directed to self-fulfillment.