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Mapping the Contexts of Contemporary Curating: The Visual Arts Exhibitionary Complex
Abstract
In cities throughout the world, the Visual Arts Exhibitionary Complex (VAEC) is a constellation of exhibitionary venues that ranges from metropolitan museums to pop-up installations and Internet postings. This article maps VAECs as historical developments, as power hierarchies, and as consisting of distinct but internally dynamic elements that interact with each other constantly. VAECs are the primary contexts in which curating is done today, so this article also presents a series of charts that outline the historical evolution and the current forms of professional categorization within curating: types of exhibition, display formats, curatorial styles, projective publics and modes of collaboration.
This text (integrated in my academic aggegation) belongs to an essay on art, cultural heritage, remembrance and Europe. Here is the introduction and the first point: art (modern/contemporary) and cultural relations with the past. It is also a short an articulated reading of extensive bibliography. Other parts will have the overview of debates and agendas Europe for cultural heritage (EU&Council of Europe). They will have iconography.
The main in the overall essay is to advance a renewed framework to cross the problematic of cultural heritage with that of remembrance. Not to be confused limitedly with mere memory (furthermore always complex with inductions and re/constructions). Neither as just a cultural memory. A umbrella notion that I discuss in some part because it obscures the web of plural pasts (and the kind of pasts) enrolled in (again) plural memories & heritages.
Remembrance implies the relationship between memory and history with returns, rescues and more dimensions of memories. History is embedded in cultural heritages themselves transporting various pasts in chronological terms, among other connotations.
The two areas of heritage and remembrance are vast but rather redundant, so arguments and evidence are summarized.
The binomial is joined by the triangulation distinguishing mnemonic, heritage, and historicity regimes that relate the present with various categories of past. It is the core of the perspective, which refers not to areas but to transversal experiences of time, or times, in the "vocabulary of the present".
The gaze is therefore directed towards intersections and semantics of times (historical, distant, recent, contemporary, etc.) in/with heritage; remembrance; and art as another mode of bridge/break of time
This document gathers references from an essay (abbreviated in a chapter in the academic aggregation) on the issue of remembrance that articulates dimensions of history, memory and cultural heritage-in general and in Europe. It is a conceptual framework that in the essay also dialogues with images and modern/contemporary art and heritage. This work comes from a line of research and teaching that has been developed for over a decade with studies, a transdisciplinary seminar, and a series of courses/workshops on European themes.
This article examines DMT by Jeremy Shaw, a Berlin-based Canadian artist whose oeuvre has investigated altered states. For this 2004 video work, Shaw administered the hallucinogen dimethyltryptamine to a group of friends and videotaped their experiences. I am interested in how Shaw curates the psychedelic session as a performance of the drug’s agency and aesthetic power. A powerful entheogen similar to psilocybin and ayahuaska, DMT induces intense feelings of euphoria and hallucinations that have been used for divinatory and healing purposes. Beyond its recreational uses, DMT has been found to be effective in the therapeutic treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, substance addiction and in palliative care. Since their pioneering experiments of the 1960s, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner’s determinant of ‘setting’ -- the context of the psychedelic session -- has remained a critical factor. In current psychopharmacological research, the aesthetics of setting are now understood to be crucial in shaping the psychedelic experience. The affective contexts of Shaw’s psychedelic sessions provide a striking contrast to the institutional approximations of domestic interiors used in clinical trials. Shaw curates the psychedelic experience in several registers. First, Shaw’s role as session guide or care-taker for participants undergoing extraordinary states sustains the etymological meaning of ‘curating’ which originally described a catalytic encounter of one tasked with the care of souls (usually a priest). Second, Shaw configures the atmosphere of the setting with the neutral atmosphere of a ‘white cube’ gallery. Framed against a white background, close headshots of the person undergoing the psychedelic enable intimate examination of their euphoric facial expressions and intoxicated comportment. While the conceptual formality and white performance field are almost clinical, subtitles flashing at the bottom of the screen, drawn from trip reports by the artist, reveal his collaborators’ struggles to verbalize their hallucinations.
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