Finding an Audience: Working with the Professionals

The idea of the curator or the director as an integral part of an art work is a very new idea. In my opinion. I think it is a combination of things that has given rise to this circumstance. One is the proliferation of popular culture and the other is the creation of open ended, rather obtuse and fully experiential art works. The curator, therefore, has become this intermediary between an artist who is making process-based art and audience very concerned with “getting it”. The director is the translator, mediating and explaining the experience for an audience that, especially if they are perceived to be outside of the art world, do not have the critical basis for understanding highly conceptual and contemporary artwork.

Photography is no different, it has a complex and critical history in 1960s conceptual photography. The question, I think, that often comes up with curators and directors is how to proliferate their medium of choice to viewers that are trained in understanding and deconstructing popular culture. Popular culture comes prepackaged most the time, and while it might encourage certain kinds of thought doesn’t necessarily encourage critical deconstruction of its form, message or visuality. Unlike 1990s installation art, popular culture comes closed, with the privileged viewpoint that discourages any discourse about its responsibility to its medium and philosophical musings about where to position it in relationship to history, understanding and existentialism. Now photography is not installation art, it does have a privileged viewpoint. That viewpoint is the frame chosen by the photographer. However if you look at the history of conceptual photography in Vancouver, this privileged viewpoint is in flux. From the highly elaborate and completely constructed images of Jeff Wall, to the documentary and re-creation of historical moments by Stan Douglas, In Vancouver are conceptual photography can be anything from highly polished advertising like images to completely de-skilled snapshots galleries. So the role of the curator and the director in Vancouver has been to identify which art movement we are witnessing, andAnd help us to situate it in to its art historical context.

My criticism with the artist curator relationship has always been that if one’s art needs to be explained by another person in their gallery with a wall of text, what’s the point of putting it into visual form in the first place? In a way I am sad that we were given a textbook for this class without any actual images in it because it proliferates this idea that with every great piece of art comes a great essay, and what seems to be lost in the message is that these essays become part of the piece. Fundamentally. So we’re in an art context where visuality and explanation are merged. Deconstruction is encouraged, But the right deconstruction is encouraged by the curator. I find the curator-audience relationship fundamentally contradictory to the philosophies espoused by this open ended art practice, especially in art practice that is based in process rather than product.The artist thus becomes the irrational, emotional producer of images and the curator becomes the intelligent, logical interpreter, a professional that will help to guide the audience. As an artist who’s critical of this relationship must find a form to negotiate working within a gallery setting, and being able to shift the perception away from this constant explanation. Simply abandoning the gallery is not difficult, because this explanation based culture has very much marginalized this visual art practice from the consuming mainstream.

A Response to Section 3 of The Education of a Photographer, edited by Charles H. Traub, Steven Heller and Adam B. Bell