CuratorsinContext.ca

Curating as Art Making

by Paul Couillard

Date: 03 December 2005
Event: Toronto

Abstract

In 20 years of activity as an artist, I have created work in a variety of media from performance to video to writing to installation. Simultaneously, I have worked as a curator, producer and director of artist-run centres. Many people have found themselves moving between the roles of "artist" and "curator", which they tend to perceive as distinct and separate activities. My own experience, however, has led me to take on these two roles as inseparable elements of a hybrid or interdisciplinary practice: that of the artist/curator.

Curating is an essential part of my artistic output. I use it as one medium within my larger practice, just as another artist might move between plastic and electronic media. The knowledge I develop through curating dramatically influences the way I make performances and environments -- just as creating performances has an essential influence on the way I curate exhibitions. While curating differs in form from creating a performance or making an object, it nonetheless offers equal creative and authorial challenges. If painting, writing or composing can be understood as "generative" talents within the fine arts (in the sense that they result in the creation of an object, text or score); if acting, dancing or playing music can be understood as "interpretive" talents: then directing, choreographing or curating can be understood as "organizational" talents.

When asked what I do as an artist, my first response has been to say that I create situations. This (admitted) oversimplification serves as a starting point, in the same way that a performing artist might say she tells stories, or a visual artist might say she makes objects. Consequently, I was very interested to hear Matthew Higgs describe his curatorial practice using exactly the same words ("I create situations") at InFest, an international conference on artist-run culture held in Vancouver in February 2004 (on a panel entitled "Metamorphosis: The Artist as Curator"). The notion of a practice -- be it "artistic" or "curatorial" -- based on the creation of situations points to the growing attention on the relationships among art, artist and audience that are foregrounded in theories such as relational aesthetics. It also suggests a territory where the roles of artist and curator may begin to blur, as they have in my own work.

A curatorial project, like most performative work, sets up a situation of inter-relationships in time and space. Viewing artist/curator as a hybrid practice seems a natural extension of the rhetoric of artist-directed activity upon which the Canadian artist-run centre network was formed. In positing curating as an "artistic" practice, one can also draw on parallels in other disciplines, particularly in the performing arts (for example, in the role of the artistic director). At the same time, various pressures -- e.g.: concerns about "professionalism" prompting artist-run centres to mimic the bureaucracies of public galleries and arts councils; authorial interests of exhibiting artists and/or exhibition aspirations of artist-members competing with or sometimes generating fundamental philosophical opposition to the notion of "curator as artist"; and worries about potential conflicts of interest -- problematize any such consideration.

What are the potential consequences when artmaking and curating intersect as practices? How might such a hybrid practice change the way a curator works? How might it influence the relationship between a curator and the artists with whom she works? These are some of the issues I propose to consider.