{"id":12,"date":"2021-04-19T14:12:30","date_gmt":"2021-04-19T18:12:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/mux300-isabelr\/?page_id=12"},"modified":"2021-04-20T16:09:17","modified_gmt":"2021-04-20T20:09:17","slug":"introduction","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/constelacion\/introduction\/","title":{"rendered":"introduction"},"content":{"rendered":"

In her speculative text \u201cReport of the Department for Lesbian Revolutionary Art,\u201d historian Holly Firmin writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

Curation was, before the revolution, more often than not the extraction of surplus value from women artists by men-curators, from trans artists by cis-curators, from gay artists by hetero-curators, from black artists by white-curators, from disabled artists by able-curators. It was curators who acted as the gatekeepers to the means of production: the means to assign value to art, and the resources with which to create it. The existing border between the curator and the curated has been ripped apart as artist-led, collective practice dominates, whilst the individualised, market-based model of artistic production has all but dissolved.1<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Firmin\u2019s \u201cReport\u201d imagines a new art world, one that has eradicated the social hierarchies and monetary inequality of our contemporary moment in favor of collective practices and unfettered global creativity. The \u201cReport\u201d is born out of the frustrating reality of our contemporary crisis: that which the Collective Rewilding team\u2014a curatorial laboratory run by Sara Garz\u00f3n, Ameli M. Klein, and Sabina Oroshi\u2014identifies as one of a <\/span>broken world, <\/span><\/i>a world plagued by precarity due to the unfettered effects of global capitalism.2<\/a><\/sup> <\/span>Critic Zarina Muhammad exposes how this broken world affects the cultural industry: unpaid internships, grant competitions that pit artists against each other, boards of trustees who place neoliberal interests over those of their constituents.<\/span>3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

How must cultural workers answer Firmin\u2019s call for the eradication of curation? How can we fix this broken world? Curator Maura Reilly proposes <\/span>curatorship-as-praxis<\/b>: working horizontally to find connections across disciplines, temporalities, and geographies, with activism at the forefront.<\/span>4<\/a><\/sup> Along the same lines, art historian Claire Bishop visualizes <\/span>curation as a <\/b>constellation<\/i><\/b>, <\/span><\/i>expanding Walter Benjamin\u2019s \u201carchive of the commons\u201d into a \u201cproject of bringing events together in new ways, disrupting established taxonomies, disciplines, mediums, and proprieties…in order to break the spell of calcified traditions, mobilizing the past by bringing it blazing into the present\u201d which \u201cpulls into the foreground that which has been sidelined, repressed, and discarded in the eyes of the dominant classes.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup><\/span>\u00a0In her analysis of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Museo Nacional de Reina Sof\u00eda in Madrid and MSUM in Ljubljana, Bishop applies Reilly\u2019s curatorial activism to the museum collection itself.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Similarly, queer theorist Gayatri Gopinath demands that we embark on curation with \u201ca sense of obligation to document, analyze, archive, and value the small, the inconsequential, and the ephemeral\u201d and so bring together \u201cdisparate racial formations, geographies, temporalities, and colonial and postcolonial histories of displacement and dwelling.\u201d6<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0If curating is about bringing pieces together, can <\/span>curating<\/b> not function then <\/span>as an act of care<\/b>, as an act of reparation? In a sense, Bishop, Reilly, and Gopinath echo Firmin\u2019s speculative call for the eradication of cultural institutions in the wake of Muhammad\u2019s criticism of the contemporary moment. We must reimagine how museums function, what collections we are acquiring, and how we are presenting them if we aim to fix this broken world.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This project aims to document the various ways in which cultural workers across the Western Hemisphere reimagine curation and the presentation of culture in the wake of widespread institutional critique. There are contemporary instances of radical curatorial activism, constellatory thinking, and ethical care work that already build the reality that Firmin imagines. However, this work is being done <\/span>outside of the museum itself. <\/span><\/i>In line with Gopinath\u2019s attention to the often-ephemeral nature of subaltern sites of history, this project considers radical publishing practices as the foil to the contemporary museological system. It asks:<\/span><\/p>\n

In what ways are radical publishing practices serving to curate and present culture? How can they serve as models or alternatives for contemporary museums to engage in decolonial and decannonizing work?<\/span><\/i><\/h4>\n

In order to answer these questions, this project charts a constellation of collaborative cultural production and dissemination. If a museum must serve as the \u201carchive of the commons,\u201d why not get rid of museum walls altogether? Why not go into\u2014and break\u2014the archive itself?<\/span><\/p>\n

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  1. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Holly Firmin, \u201cReport of the Department for Lesbian Revolutionary Art,\u201d 2020, https:\/\/drive.google.com\/file\/d\/1X7_gsa6qA5OnKxJDYdLyBp7nxzdsygyA\/view. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  2. \u201cBroken World,\u201d Collective Rewilding, accessed January 12, 2021, https:\/\/www.collectiverewilding.com\/terms\/broken-world. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  3. <\/span>Zarina Muhammad, \u201cIdeas for a New Art World,\u201d <\/span>The White Pube<\/span><\/i> (blog), April 4, 2020, https:\/\/www.thewhitepube.co.uk\/ideasforanewartworld.<\/span> ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  4. Maura Reilly and Lucy R. Lippard, Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating<\/i> (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  5. Claire Bishop and Dan Perjovschi, Radical Museology or, \u201cWhat\u2019s Contemporary\u201d in Museums of Contemporary Art?<\/i>, 2., rev. ed (London: Koenig Books, 2014), 56. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  6. <\/span>Gayatri Gopinath, <\/span>Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora<\/span><\/i>, Perverse Modernities (Durham\u202f; London: Duke University Press, 2018), 4. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    In her speculative text \u201cReport of the Department for Lesbian Revolutionary Art,\u201d historian Holly Firmin writes: Curation was, before the…<\/p>\n

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