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Let us remember once again one of Marx's caveats: we cannot tell from the mere taste of wheat who grew it; the product gives no hint as to the systems or relations of production. The product seems to be all the more specific and readily describable, the more closely the theoretician relates it to ideal forms of causation, comprehension, or expression, rather than to the real process of production on which it depends. (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus).

1. Art in a social context

When I was commissioned to write this essay, I was asked to write about art in a social context (being an artist, being a curator, the art community, the institution, etc). This might appear unremarkable at first, but in my mind it is anything but. It is, in my experience, terribly rare and terribly refreshing for a municipal gallery in New Zealand to actually want to consider their curatorial projects socially.

Looking at how it is for artists, for example, is a very timely thing for a public art gallery to be doing. In 2004, artists are finding it harder and harder to make work - resources are tighter than ever and the global political climate is increasingly right wing and intolerant of creativity and freedom generally. It is beginning to look like a miracle that art is even made at all; each work starts to look like a small victory over the society of the spectacle. Rare, too, is that City Gallery Wellington has asked an artist to curate Telecom Prospect 2004: New Art New Zealand. And rarer still, that this performance artist is a young woman who has a solid background in the artist-run and project-space scene. Emma Bugden is, in my opinion, to be applauded for the even-handed respectful and inclusive way she has assembled this large exhibition of contemporary art - a kind of approach that is allowed to happen much less than it should.

2. Curating and taxidermy

I was unsure whether to use the quote I have selected as an epigraph. It is from a beautiful, but complex book: it has taken me months to read even its initial sections. I don't know if I support the way in which one seems to need to be an intellectual of an extreme order to navigate the themes of a lot of big international biennales and I wasn't sure if bringing this sort of material in helps. But I decided that it does, as this passage and the following section contains such important ideas in relation to contemporary curating - it is much easier to look at art isolated from its social context, but, ultimately, to do so is to trade in life-draining simplifications.

I am definitely not a supporter of the over-intellectualisation of art, yet I am absolutely no supporter of the way museums often dumb things down. Attempting to reduce meaning to specific, imposed, taxidermied, reductive, narrowing, factually-stated interpretations and stunting key themes helps no one - not artists and not audiences. There is, however, an important middle ground where art can remain alive and functioning in group shows.

Theme shows can be great, but their titles and premises need to proceed from things actually happening in the art they draw together. It is important to leave behind the idea that an artwork has a specific list of contents like a jar of pickles or something; and that it is the curator's or viewer's job to diagnose, or psychoanalyse, the work being exhibited. Furthermore, biennales are too often add-to-cart theme shows that treat artworks like 'raw materials' (as artist John Baldessari put it) in the illustration of the curator's interests. The resulting 'recipe' group shows have very little to do with why the work was made. By snipping artwork from its original context for inclusion in a group show curators tend to ignore the fact that that artworks are 'complex entities with their own structure and histories, blind spots and illuminations, relevance and detours', as arts writer John Welchman said of American artist Mike Kelley's work.

3. Trusting the artist

The opening quote was drawn from a book that is subtitled 'Capitalism and Schizophrenia' and which looks critically at 'the institution'. In this passage Deleuze and Guattari discuss the study of schizophrenia within the psychiatric institution, but it is useful to apply what they wrote to the study of the visual arts, given the longstanding perception of the artist as someone 'touched', a bit mental; interesting, fascinating even, but basically incoherent and, ultimately, not to be trusted.

The authors suggest that it is not useful to look at the patient (read artist) in isolation, as doing so halts the desiring/creative process. But, as they write, 'the moment one describes, on the contrary, the material process of production, the specificity of the product tends to evaporate, while at the same time the possibility of another outcome, another end result of the process appears'. This idea suggests that a new sort of group show is entirely possible: one that allows art the space to keep working and for new (i.e. not predetermined) outcomes to take place.

Janet Frame's passing this year has given me a great deal to think about in terms of the way our culture deals with creativity and how it is considered pathological, aberrant in some measure. Frame's entire oeuvre could be seen as being about an insistence on personal freedom, of the value of fantasy, art, in the face of a conservative provincial society that labelled her crazy and tried to make her sane and to get her 'under control'. She apparently only narrowly escaped a lobotomy because a doctor read in a newspaper she had won a literary prize.

In Frame's 1961 book The Edge of the Alphabet there is a character who reviles artists. He can't bear the way they destabilise things and thinks that all they need is to be made to work on buses. Institutions have tended to behave like this in a way by casting artists as creators in need of being curated - organised, articulated, decoded. The artist is left without a voice or agency and is often not remunerated adequately, if at all.

3(b). The implicit value of art

While I was writing this essay, I received an email from Daniel Malone, one of the artists featured in Telecom Prospect 2004, who made some valid points about how artists feel about having their work curated:

4. Outside the institution

In the face of this taxidermy of their work, artists have found artist-run activities to be hugely empowering and liberating. Indeed, New Zealand and Australia have a fine and interesting history of artist-run initiatives - it could even be said that 'out t/here in the community' is where the bulk of art here actually happens. Siegfried Kracauer, in his 1927 essay 'The Mass Ornament', characterised cultural productions that arise out the community (the people/volk) as having 'a sense of organic life, and magic force'. This is the reason that curators are wise to come to the artist-run scene for their raw materials; but they must be very careful how they host the work or else it can just end up as ornament and not in a good way - taxidermied specimens at worst, happy guests at best.

Artist-run spaces are often tree hut organisations of the most excellent sort. They support discourse and, in doing so, feed the development of radical subjectivities together. Indeed, it has even been suggested that, in this day and age, self-organising is the new natural selection.

As with radical feminism, separatist activities are very important for art to change, but what next? Institutional reform is what. Artists often feel, in relation to large-scale institutional projects that they are being used. There is a fashion in curating internationally that casts the curator as auteur, the über-artist who jangles the keys and acts as the gatekeeper. Artists, however, want more agency, to be paid and to have the opportunity to articulate their work in space, for its internal/relational logic to operate.

5. The biennale problem

As a solution to this situation, many call for the binary relationship between artist and curator to be abandoned in favour of more of an organic mixture of artist/writer/curator. There is also encouragement for institutions to become conversant with many of the issues artists have worked through in the postmodern era - the expanded field, the found object, installation practice, performativity, the post-media condition, relational aesthetics...

Something that is great about Telecom Prospect 2004 is that it is a Whitney-style biennale that samples a country's contemporary practice. Most other biennales (the events are now legion) are international thematically-driven events. The 2004 Whitney Biennale (on show as I write this) may have themes, but they are not usually that loudly stated and tend to proceed from currents read into the work. It doesn't bear an unwieldy theme that crushes the work - curators must tread very carefully when constructing umbrella concepts. They can end up being more like falling concrete blocks.

Telecom Prospect 2004 doesn't really have a thematic structure, instead it has more of a brief; but even calling it Prospect is a sort of a meta-theme in itself. The word 'prospect' conjures up images of gold-miners and gang initiations which, I guess, is not far off what any curatorial project is ultimately about.

The basic problem is that most curators proceed from concepts, but not all artists do. Artists may be thinking about shapes, materials, combinations, aesthetics, images, interplay and not necessarily about meaning. This sort of modus operandi raises the question: is contemporary curating a post-conceptual practice harking back to the days when artists joked about just needing a typewriter? (It is no coincidence, I think, that the first curator-as-auteur, Harold Szeemann, was up to his ears in the Fluxus movement.) Not all art is that classical, or cerebral.

So, as a basic principle, curator-auteurs have to be very, very, very good and know a lot about art. They must be conversant with a range of work that has a range of operating systems. What sort of individual can actually achieve this?

6. The artist as curator?

Such issues have been recently examined by the e-flux project 'The Next Documenta Should Be Curated by an Artist' (see www.e-flux.com/projects). In this online project, a variety of artists were asked to respond to the proposition 'The next documenta should be curated by an artist'. The resulting pieces of writing have been posted on the website and these and the resulting online discussion that followed have recently been published as a book. There were some very apposite points made and I think that an executive summary could prove useful:

Ken Lum: 'My view is that the idea of art is always larger than any art system. It is the reason why it is often so painful to be an artist, just trying to negotiate the passage of art into the art system.'

Ricardo Basbaum: 'When artists curate, they cannot avoid mixing their artistic investigations with the proposed curatorial project: for me this is the strength and singularity they bring to curating.'

Julia Scher: 'The ideal artist-as-curator is an artist who has deeply mined a certain vein of artistic practice. [and] appreciates the complementary nature of the three increasingly merging aspects of today's art world: artist, critic and curator.'

John Baldessari: 'Curators wanting to be artists. Architects wanting to be artists. I don't know if this is an unhealthy trend or not. What disturbs me is a growing tendency for artists to be used as raw materials, like paint, canvas, etc. I am uneasy about being used as an ingredient for an exhibition recipe, i.e. to illustrate a curator's thesis.'

Joseph Grigley: 'That is the point of such an exhibition: to reveal the complexity of the ways art comes into being.'

Frederico Herrero: 'There is not really a distinction between an artist and a curator.'

Tim Lee: 'My prospectus for a documenta would include humor as the primary agent for social commentary.'

John Miller: 'The artist presents him- or herself as homo ludens, the one who plays. Art-as-play symbolises utopian freedom as an alternative to capitalism's cyclical crises, the worst of which erupted in fascism.'

Martha Rosler: 'Documenta is a diagnosis and an ethical compass rather than a poetically inspired walk through a garden of aesthetic delights.'

Marina Abramovic: 'When things work: When artists choose to work together at the same time and in the same space, this type of group show has a certain chemistry in its togetherness.'

Dara Birnbaum: 'Should we instead establish a kind of "World Wildlife Fund" for artists, where funds would be evenly distributed to artist in order to prevent the endangerment of their species?'

Daniel Buren: 'At the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, no exhibition organiser would have dared to claim out loud that they were the authors of whatever exhibition they were in charge of, and they would be even less inclined to claim that they were artists!'

Laura Belém: 'By extending the artistic practice to include curating, writing, and other forms of exchange and collaboration, we subvert relations of power and move toward a more truly democratic, pluralistic art sphere.'

8. Scary times

It is for such community reasons that institutions can learn much from the artist-run scene. If the development of (radical) subjectivity is necessarily relational, the artist-run scene traditions of open camaraderie, discourse, hospitality, participation, creative freedom and koha are indeed valuable. Such an approach could even be seen to relate to an extension of the concept of tino rangitiritanga, or the right to self-determination.

But all this implies a lot of work for people, doesn't it? In the same way that not all artists want to be curators, not all audiences want to be producers of meaning. Many museum-goers seem nostalgic for the days when 'it was all there in the art' and they didn't have to create meaning themselves by way of exchange between the viewer and the work. However, I would say that now is not the time to desire this sort of passivity. These are indeed scary when self-hood seems to be, to many, more about property and a veneer of success than anything else.

In conclusion, some critics are rather jaded about biennales, but I would hesitate to throw the baby out with the bath water. Large shows, thematic or otherwise, can be amazing experiences. Fundamentally, the quality of such extravaganzas seems to depend on the curators really knowing something about contemporary art practice; if a theme is to be introduced it should have something to do with things actually happening in art, those forced encounters at the edge of the alphabet.



Bibliography

Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, France: Les presses du reel,1998.

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Janet Frame, The Edge of the Alphabet, Christchurch: Pegasus Press, 1962.

Jens Hoffmann, 'The Next Documenta Should Be Curated by an Artist', e-flux, available online at http://www.e-flux.com/projects/next_doc/

Sigfried Kracauer, 'The Mass Ornament' (1927) in The Mass Ornament: Weimer Essays, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995.

John Welchman (ed.), Mike Kelley: Foul Perfection - essays and criticism, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003.

© City Gallery Wellington and the author, 2004.