Disaster preparedness

First up, the director of the American National Gallery is called Earl “Rusty” Powell III. I want more New Zealand directors to have diminutives - even better, I would like them to have wrestler names, like 'Mad Dog' and 'The Axe'.

Secondly, and more on topic - an interesting article about National Gallery curator Andrew Robison, who is the guardian of seven black, cloth-lined boxes that constitute the gallery's 'in case of World War III' collection of works on paper:

In 1979, with Washington worried about 52 hostages in Tehran and terrorist threats at home, Robison’s boss asked him to create a big container for works of the highest value. If catastrophe hit, the container could be spirited away to an undisclosed location. Today, Robison has seven boxes in two separate storerooms — four for European holdings, three for American. These do not include the museum’s 10,000 photographs, 3,800 paintings and 2,900 sculptures, outside of Robison’s purview and mostly too big for any mad dash out the building. And because his works are so fragile and light-sensitive, they live most of their lives in protective storage, going on the walls for viewing only in short spurts.

The fact I found most interesting:

During Robison’s 38-year tenure, the works-on-paper collection more than doubled, from 50,000 to 106,000, and routinely his team found additions that pushed out other masterworks. In fact, only 27 percent of what Robison first put in the boxes in 1979 is still inside them.

The article is a little sneering about curators ("Robison is neither a rogue nor a prig, the two usual poles of cultural debate") but still an interesting peek behind the scenes. I wonder what's on our disaster boxes?

Take me there

Humans make patterns out of information, even when patterns don't really exist. Hence lucky undies, and this post.

Over the past few weeks I've seen posts and articles about 'curation' popping up all over the place.

First up, Aaron Straup Cope at this year's Museums and the Web presented a paper titled 'Buckets and Vessels', looking at curatorial practices ranging from Flickr Galleries to Newspaper Club. (See the slides from Cope's presentation) He argued:

People are not suddenly self-identifying as curators. Rather, what we are seeing is a growth of tools being made available to allow people to exercise a curatorial muscle many people never knew existed, even if the results don’t always look like something we’re used to.

Cope cited Pete of New Curator's March 2010 article 'You are not a curator'. Pete argues for the difference between filtering (sifting and aggregating data) and curating, which in the comments he says begins with "providing meaning".

The difference between aggregating (picking) and curating (adding meaning) is a sub-current of Robert Scoble's lengthy post 'The seven needs of real-time curators'. Scoble sees a market gap to build tools that will let people aggregate, weight, and visually represent data from all over the web in a way that's meaningful to them and to others.

Then a post a few weeks ago on the Nieman Lab site caught my eye: Calmness, curation, cat porn: Dave Eggers’ joys of print:

“I want a printed newspaper curated and edited by professionals that have been in the trade for decades,” Eggers said. “I am in eternal deference to expertise.” Eggers likes the idea of branded — which is to say, vetted — news outlets shaping his view of the world. “I entrust my daily news input to the professionals,” he said.

Finally - another MW2010 paper, this one by Nate Solas on 'Hiding Our Collections in Plain Site: Interface Strategies for "Findability"' about a website re-design intended to help with the problems faced with surfacing large amounts of digitised collection items.

What's the pattern that I see here? You could say "ways to defeat information overload", but I refute that term. Close your eyes. Switch off the tv. Shut down the browser. Or - find people and tools that reliably take you to things that are valuable, entertaining, expanding.

Curatorial challenge

The Rita Angus retrospective has got me thinking about survey shows.

One of the things that works in favour of the Angus show is the consistency of format and subject matter. It helps a big show hold together for a mass audience who might not be familiar with her work or New Zealand art history.

So how would a curator work with an artist whose practice has gone through a bunch of twists and turns? How would you take an audience with you from here



to here?



Images:
Michael Stevenson, Grave Flowers Louisiana, 1992. Oil on board. Image from the Hamish McKay Gallery website.
Michael Stevenson, The gift, 2004–06. Aluminium, wood, rope, bamboo, synthetic polymer paint, WWII parachute and National Geographic magazines. Collection Queensland Art Gallery, image from the APT5 website.

What does it mean to be a curator?

I've just read a really interesting interview with Douglas McLennan, creator of ArtsJournal.com, an all-time favourite site of mine, and one of the five sites that opens automatically when I launch Firefox in the morning.

McLenna's not just a creator. He's a curator. To quote him:

The good thing about ArtsJournal is that it's a curated service. We define what the territory is and then pick out the most interesting things. The curation aspect of ArtsJournal is its strength, but it is also a weakness because the curation reflects mostly my taste.

As users have more access to more information on the Web, the sheer amount becomes overwhelming. So increasingly you have to depend on curators — other people — to find the good stuff that you want to see over time. So you find the curator whom you trust. That way, you have a way to navigate through a lot of information.

So, in this context, being a curator means winnowing the best* stuff from all the other stuff, as a service for an interested audience. Which suddenly made me think - what does it mean to be an art curator these days?

So I went to the web and typed in a few search terms: "become a curator" "career curator" "curator job". Sadly, I didn't find anything risible. What I did find though were some fairly happy outlooks: Monster predicts an increase of 10 to 20 percent in employment of curators through 2008, and StateUniversities.com rates the career outlook as 'good'

Less positively, the British careers guidance website Prospects notes that long-term career prospects are uncertain and the US Dept of Labour notes that competition is tremendous as there are far more MA grads than jobs.

But best of all, our very own New Zealand Career Services site has a literal forecast:


Funny as I find that, the info about this career option on the site is interesting and, I think, probably very useful if you have a teenager at home keen to throw themselves into the arena:

• Turnover among curators is low, partly because of New Zealand’s small population and the limited number of curator jobs available. Vacancies usually occur when people change employers or move into more senior roles. Because of this, curators need to be flexible about moving to where jobs are available

• Curators usually earn between $40,000 and $70,000 a year depending on their level of responsibility and the size of the institution they work in.

• The highest proportion of people were employed in the Wellington (28%) Auckland (26%) and Canterbury (11%) regions.

*McLennan recognises that 'best' in this context means 'what I consider to be the best'.

Sense and sensibility

Maybe I don't read the right newspapers, but there's been less coverage than I expected of last week's Venice announcement.

The most awkward moment was when Judy Millar and Frances Upritchard 'met' for the first time since the announcement in a three-way call with Lynn Freeman on Radio New Zealand. The interview itself was quite interesting, especially when the inevitable "will your work reflect New Zealand" question arose.

Freeman asked Millar "We know you for your abstraction [blogger - huh?]; is there going to be a New Zealand feel to the abstraction?". Millar stated that she wasn't interested in "ideas of pure abstraction", and was more interested in the "idea of an image". Freeman then asked her if her imagery would have a New Zealand feel, or if it could be "more subtle than that" [blogger: god, I would hope so]. Millar was pretty clear she wouldn't be painting abstracted kiwifruit or All Blacks any time soon.

Upritchard noted that it was hard to see where "the New Zealand" was in her work anymore, and that Venice itself was in some ways the origin of the work she'll produce for the Biennale; the figurines she's been working on recently, which will feature in the work, emerged from the experience of seeing medieval carvings in Venice.

Later Freeman moved into the "furore and bad feeling" that surrounded et al's Venice project, and the "responsibility" that placed on Upritchard and Millar to help "mend bridges" with the New Zealand public. At this point both Millar and Upritchard [blogger: rightly] pretty flatly said it was their job to make good art - nothing more, nothing less.

Reading Christopher Moore's piece in the Press , with his talk of a 'distinctive New Zealand sensibility', I had to wonder if he'd heard the interview. Even more surprising was this statement:

For the first time in several years, it was also a genuinely representative national team, rather than one that was drawn from the tight introspective world of Auckland's curatorial elite.

Maybe it's a Christchurch thing (bearing in mind Andrew Paul Wood's Artbash rant about the Auckland-centric Walters Prize), but I'd never thought that the previous Venice projects had any Auckland clique-ness. If anything, the artists we've sent to Venice are notable for the amount they work outside of New Zealand.

So my weekend question: who is this mysterious Auckland curatorial elite? Does it have something to do with wearing the right shoes?

Cerebral challenge

I've been idly tracking reviews of the Whitney Biennial, which have been mixed (nothing new there). This sentence in Jerry Saltz's review caught my attention though:

Like many young curators, Huldisch and Momin are more cerebral than they are visual, and this show feels very, very controlled.

Later on Saltz describes the show as 'academic' and a sidebar draws attention to the two curators' 'sparkling academic CVs'. My take on the review is that Saltz feels the curators made their choices based less on visual impact, more on the concepts the artists are working with.

What interests me is that Saltz sees this is a young curator thing: like it's either (a) something they'll grow out of (b) something they'll learn their way out of, or (c) a trend. If I were an evil lecturer in visual culture, this is definitely a statement I'd make my students parse.


NB Vision is cool. And it is, of course, a cerebral process. Dredging up some 3rd year neuroscience, light enters the eye, bounces around a bit, and is broken down by receptors on the retina at the back of the eyball.

This information is passed along each eye's respective optic nerve; information from the two eyes meets at the optic chiasm, where it is mixed and divided into visual fields.

From the optic chiasm the information passes along the optic tracts, and about 90% enters the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus (a small percentage is diverted to the midbrain, creating a really interesting phenomenon known as 'blindsight'). From the LGN the information is passed on to the primary visual cortex, which is right at the back of your brain, where the visual image is built back up again.

Tall dark and handsome

A bit OTT

You know what we don't have enough of in our art reporting?* Physical descriptions of artists and curators. This NY Magazine write-up of the coming Whitney Biennial includes the following in the first 3 paras:

"doe-eyed bearded men and slim-hipped men"

"Momin, petite in heels and a tightly belted long sweater over a dark green baby-doll dress"

"a lanky 34-year-old New York artist"

"a tall blonde woman standing in the center gallery. It’s Henriette Huldisch [with] her taller, blonder husband, Andy Graydon ... It’s past eight and Huldisch, who has an infant at home, is giving Graydon the look that means it’s time to leave. It’s barely perceptible, a flattening of the lips and an intensity about the eyes."

A bit mental

Meanwhile - Sydney's Hardware Gallery opened its annual Google exhibition over the weekend:

On the same day, at the same time, all the artists had to google the same phrase. From page 2 of the results they had to select one site as their sole source of inspiration for their artwork.

The phrase this year was: Completely Rooted.

For the organisers, the phrase's appeal "lay in its ambiguity".

A bit dirty

Robert Rauschenberg has filed lawsuits against a Florida artist and art gallery who have allegedly been selling discarded studio items found in Rauschenberg's trash.



*Yeah, okay, okay, we don't have a lot in the way of art reporting, so this is a fairly open-ended question.

Art - leafy greens for the brain

Who thought I'd ever sample from a website called Daddytypes? However, this quote from a long post about taking a wee kid to look at abstract art is priceless.


A docent explaining Clyfford Still's 1951-N to a group of school children:

"Well, there are curators - do you know what that is? art experts who study and know what art is important enough to be in a museum - curators and art historians and other experts who say this is art, and even if it doesn't look like it's about anything and it doesn't make any sense, you just have to bear with it sometimes."

Disclaimer: Some of my best friends are curators. Really.

Image: Clyfford Still,1951-N, 1951. Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection, Gift in honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art. 1989.87.1