Among the many aspects of a curator’s role, I believe what demands most of the curator’s vision is to conceive the theme of the exhibition against an existing societal background. At that point of time the curator is like a film director when he or she decides how a story would be told. Presented with a plethora of options, each coming with a series of implications, I can see at least two high level approaches a curator can explore: presenting the theme as a statement of viewpoint, or posing an inviting question for the audience to contemplate.
Simon Sheikh, in his article “Constitutive Effects: The techniques of the curator”, suggested that “curating in the future should center around three key notions: Articulation, Imagination and Continuity.”[i] On “articulation”, he elaborated that “A work of art is, at best, an articulation of something as much as it is a representation of someone: it is a proposal for how things could be seen, an offering, but not a handout.”[ii] Similarly on “imagination”, Sheikh said that “Secondly, the imaginary, as articulation, naturally has to do with the processes and potentialities of artistic production itself: to offer other imaginaries, ways of seeing and thus changing the world.”[iii] Both his points are suggesting that an exhibition, or the “directing” of a curator, is a presentation of alternative ways of seeing the world, but it is not the one and only answer because, “where you want to go and how you get there are one and the same question.”[iv] An audience has to go through the viewing process which is unique to himself to come to the meaning he would like to get out of the process of experiencing the exhibition. The curator, in this sense, is more a facilitator of this identification process rather than a director of how the process should be experienced.
However, influenced by the capitalistic values of objective-oriented and measurable success, curators cannot always justify to exhibition stakeholders their efforts on presenting merely a “suggestion”, and much the same for audiences to spend time in an exhibition where they are not given a specific conclusion to take away. As Mary Jane Jacobs puts it in her article “Making Space for Art”: “Now “to have no goals” is anathema to us, irresponsible or wrong, and with moral or monetary implications.”[v] I can see this fear in many of the LCSD-presented exhibitions in HK. Let me take the themes of two currently ongoing exhibitions to demonstrate my point: “New Visions New Colors” at the HK Museum of Art (Feb-Apr 2010) and “Legends of Luxury and Elegance: Lifestyles of the Han Nobility” at the Hong Kong Museum of History (Feb-May 2010). The 13 pieces of artworks of the “New Visions New Colors” exhibition hardly support what the theme promises, while the elaborated description “In these creations the artists express their concern for the environment of Hong Kong and wishes for the future in new multicoloured visions of our world” [vi] sounds to me an after-thought rather than a theme designed before the collection was put together. I also would challenge that “New Visions New Colors” puts forward a wrong framework of interpretation for the audiences. Similarly the description of “Legends of Luxury and Elegance” in the HK Museum of History exhibition imposes a judgment on the objects presented. I believe it will be a more insightful experience if the audiences were to discover themselves how they relate to these ancient artifacts, rather than being advised that they are “luxurious and elegance” – a suggestion to focus on their outlook instead of the role they played in the lives of the Han people.
Has the museum curators been bound by the pride of being the “authority” that they found it uncomfortable to not make a conclusive statement but presenting a possibility of interpretation?
[i] Simon Sheikh, 'Constitutive Effects: The techniques of the Curator', from Paul O' Neil (ed.), Curating Subjects (London: De Appel, 2007), 174-185
[ii] ditto
[iii] ditto
[iv] ditto
[v] Mary Jane Jacob, 'Making Space for Art' from Paula Marincola (ed.) What Makes a Great Exhibition (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage, 200 6 ), 134-141
[vi] From the Hong Kong Museum of Art website: http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/Museum/Arts/english/exhibitions/exhibitions01_jan10_01.html
19Apr2010
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