GEMINILOGGBOOKOBERDADAISTICUS

Curatorial thinking, free speech

In a prosperous municipality nearby they have concentrated all art galleries in a small area. While visiting one of the galleries, I overheard a conversation while looking at the paintings, clearly designed for the bourgoise home, some of them reminiscent of Utrillo's street scences, but with all his quaint charm replaced by fluorescent colours with a hint of street art and abstract expressionism, and another painter with sombre figures in soft grays with a dash of sepia for coloristic highlight, all done in delicate textures and washy semi-transparent layers. A culinary experience, as Adorno would say; something that doesn't offend the eye as it hangs over the sofa.

Gossip is an integral part of the art world. The conversation I overheard concerned an artist in some other town who had dumped a sculpture of a homeless person outside a bank. Apparently, no-one had ordered the removal of the heavy bronze piece. Which shows that art in the public space can be installed without much ado, bypassing heavy bureaucracy. For all I know, it may still be standing there.

Too much freedom of speech?

There was recently a debate on freedom of speech in art. For the sake of debate, even quite unwarranted questions were raised, such as: Is the freedom of speech too limited or too permitting? The debate being held in a democratic country, it was noted that there is a difference between what is juridically permissible (virtually anything) and what the climate of debate permits (much less, in part because of a mob mentality exacerbated by social media).

The context was an exhibition which, we were told, was controversial. The controversy of course happened at other places, and before the exhibition itself, notably on social media. Having witnessed the group exhibition, there was nothing even mildly shocking about it. Puzzling, perhaps, with its juxtaposition of abstraction and pre-modern academic styles of painting and prints.

A curator who clearly didn't like the exhibition said she would refuse to criticise it, because "the artists are too young and not yet mature enough to know what they are doing." As some of the debaters pointed out, a weakness of the exhibition as a whole was its unclear focus and its failure to communicate its idea. True, but why should it have to be consistent? And why should the exhibition as a whole send me a clear message? As a spectator I'm there to see each work of art, next I might make connexions between different works by the same artist, and finally, I get an impression of the exhibition as a totality which may be splintered or coherent, I don't really care. The purported lack of cohesion, thematic or stylistic unity, or programmatic clarity doesn't bother me. Curators may like to tell a story, to guide the visitor towards a specific experience, to engage them in a set of questions, present a certain perspective, and so on – I'm sure I'm missing a few artworld platitudes. In doing so, the curator is using the artist as readymade material, orchestrating their production to serve as props on the stage of the curator's, not the artist's exhibition.

The main problem, as I see it, is the virulent urge to tell a story through art, the obligatory meaning production. It gets worse when the urge comes from the curator and not the artists themselves. This goes to absurd lengths with abstract works, sometimes forced to signify something they clearly have nothing at all to do with. The artist might not be the first to suggest that the inclusion of some pink in that abstract painting has something to do with feminism (to take an hypothetical example), that idea may originate in some other artworld person's head, and later, the artist may learn that it is a good survival strategy to say that her abstract works are about identity politics, or some other currently hot topic.

Now, it's easy to see why there is a fear of the meaningless (see also my previous post on Ellul). Abstract art without a message, purpose, agenda, or suchlike will risk being seen as purely decorative and thus too light-weight, which is quite a taboo in the institutional serious art scene.

If I'd have to choose between having to believe the artist or a critic, curator, or historian of art, I'd go for the artist. Still, artists can be dishonest or, more likely, not the best qualified person to interpret their own work. I think there is too much of a belief in a single interpretation, an authoritative meaning of works of art (on this point, see Sontag's essay Against Interpretation, also discussed in a previous post). Each and everyone of us has his or her own interpretation when we look at art, that is a fact to be celebrated.

It was clear that some people allowed themselves to be irritated by certain symbols and words used in this recent "provokative" exhibition, presumably because if an artist refers to, say, an alt-right meme, that is interpreted as the artist's embrace of the ideology. It should go without saying that using symbols in art doesn't necessarily mean that you endorse what they stand for. And, in the rare case when the artist has a problematic ideology, why not try and keep the artist as a person separate from his or her œuvre? The provoked reactions, in fact, went as far as death threats against one of the least offensive artists (I don't see how pretty abstract images can be that upsetting to anyone, maybe the threats had to do with something else). We would be spared from much of these over-reactions if people had learnt to take meaning in art less seriously, less definitively. And, of course, people should be more kind to each other.

glog index

Main page