176 Curators Blog

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28 May

Art is a subject that divides people, there are the ‘my five year old could have done that’ deriders and the all out fans who grab onto everything as if it were excellent just by it’s mere existence as a product by an artist. For myself, as someone who has chosen art as their career option of choice, I see it as both of these things, sometimes fabulous and life changing, other times self indulgent egoism, which ever of these subjective interpretations is the case I also understand art as a matter of necessity. Society needs culture and culture is made physical in art, or at least sometimes it is.

Nowadays art and ideas are intertwined. Previous definitions of painting, sculpture or drawing have been added to with performance, action and intervention. One of the first things people ask when I say I work for an art collection is, what do you collect? Well, the answers to this vary from art work to art work but one of the things that marks the Zabludowicz Collection out as different is the facilitation and commissioning of art works for public exhibition, not just for inclusion in the Collection and our excitement about the possibilities that this offers to artists to engage with the idea of what forms a collection and an artwork in the first place.

This week at 176 two Danish artists, Nina Beier and Marie Lund orchestrated, ‘The Imprint’, a subtle performative intervention into Past-Forward, our current exhibition. Working with the invited curator Vincent Honore, they selected an artwork which had been put forward for inclusion in the show for every staff member in the gallery to learn the description of. The linking factor for each of these artworks was their absence from the final exhibition. Some were not included for practical reasons others for conceptual but one hundred words of blank formal verbal description was the only representation of them available both to the visitors and to the gallery attendants. Beier and Lund represented their work, ‘The Imprint’ by a wall caption similar to all the others in the exhibition, placed near the location of the gallery attendants. Therefore visitors had to actively seek out their work by asking for its whereabouts, so instigating the existence of the work at all.

For artists to base their production so completely on the absence of works of art by other artists highlights their inclusion over these others as well as the curatorial choices and the temporal and material form of the other art works which has dictated their eventual non-inclusion in the show. The gallery attendants’ aim was to try and teach the visitor the description of the work, the very nature of the spoken and learnt descriptions meant that alterations and mutations occurred in the communicated descriptions of the art works. Not only had the people describing them never seen them, but they had also never heard of them before that day.

Beier and Lund’s subtle work was intended for one evening, but will carry on throughout the show, as the gallery assistants familiarise themselves with the idea of the work they are performing and the description and content of the absent work of art they are describing both will become more present in the exhibition, despite only being there in the mind of the beholder. That is, if you choose to look for it, if you ignore it, it never existed.

22 May

I am a curator for the Zabludowicz Collection, a privately funded contemporary art collection. My role is to represent them, to be part of an ever-growing network of individuals who are enthusiastic about creative enterprises loosely bound together under the heading “art”, to ensure that the collection is in the right place at the right time, and that all the works in my charge are in good health and happiness.

The collection has recently opened a non-profit exhibition space in Chalk Farm, north London, which we’ve called 176, after its position on Prince of Wales Road. The gallery will mount three exhibitions a year working with the Zabludowicz Collection. This week we opened our third show, Past-Forward, and have already had almost 1,000 visitors.

Also this week, Anita Zabludowicz, the collector I work for, was asked to speak at a London Consortium event at the ICA, called “The Philosophy of the Overlooked: Collecting”. She talked about how collecting art can be a life-enhancing experience, akin to university, as well as the similarities and differences that art has with other collectables, such as red shoes, pocket knives, endangered birds’ eggs, etc.

One of the other speakers, John Sellars from the philosophy department at the University of the West of England, spoke on the philosophical definition of collecting. He identified it as falling comfortably between hoarding and curating. Hoarders are unable to physically remove themselves from the items they desire and have little intellectual relationship with the things and a much more visceral need for their presence. Curators care for and are attracted intellectually to their charges and enjoy talking about them but don’t feel the need to live with them or bring them into their homes – well not all the time anyway. Collectors sit between the two, physically and intellectually addicted to their chosen obsession.

This simple observation struck me as particularly useful in understanding both collecting and curating. Curating is a job that has really only existed in its current form since the Nineties (before that, art historians, art dealers and artists all acted under titles such as “exhibition organiser”). Now it is a valid career option and a very competitive arena. These days, there are almost as many curators as there are artists working out there.

Of course there are collectors who both hoard and curate and hoarders who are intellectually enthused by their passion. There are also curators who both collect and hoard. For now, suffice to say that both collecting and curating are things this blog will cover in the coming months.