I'm
really happy how proactive and engaged the MFA
students have been in A CUT and how perhaps the dialogues they instigated in
such opportunities as Meet the Writer's in Residence and chairing a
5o'clock Salon carried on once they had left the confines and privacy of these
sessions. I really hope that a collaborative exhibition does take place as part
of their assessment. I always thought it a shame that in final degree marking
in Fine Art and APCP that projects/collaborations could not be taken more into
account alongside one's practice.
In response to Tracy's post, I do feel that out of most graduates from DJCAD I have a more well-rounded experience of curation and what it can mean in contemporary visual culture. I worked as an Information Assistant to Karla Black's Venice show for the 54th Biennale and in this time I met a collector of Black's work and Arte Povera historian and curator who asked me many questions about the direction my life and my involvement in the arts was taking. When we got onto the subject of my interest in curation, he said;
In response to Tracy's post, I do feel that out of most graduates from DJCAD I have a more well-rounded experience of curation and what it can mean in contemporary visual culture. I worked as an Information Assistant to Karla Black's Venice show for the 54th Biennale and in this time I met a collector of Black's work and Arte Povera historian and curator who asked me many questions about the direction my life and my involvement in the arts was taking. When we got onto the subject of my interest in curation, he said;
"Holly, do you like people?"
- "Yes."
"Do you like working with
people?"
- "Yes."
"Then you can't possibly be a
curator."
.... This left me quite astounded. And
four months on, I don't think he's right. I think the notion of a curator is
now a very loose term. I think curators are facilitators, producers, directors
who enable artists to fully realise their creative and socially responsive
ambitions and I hope this experience as Production Assistant has instilled the
confidence in me to do this in the not so distant future.
There are many artists who work
successfully as artist-curators and vice-versa and I do believe it is essential
that curatorial practice becomes a more fundamental aspect of Contemporary Fine
Art education, as no one can curate your work better than yourself. This brings
me back to my wish that exhibition in the Cooper Gallery had been given time
to breath, and that the artists had time to reflect on the immediacy of their
sculptural performance, which could be conveyed in a series of dialogical, more
logical outcomes for a fresh audience.
Shadow prop cut-outs in the current Cooper Gallery exhibition
Nonetheless, what I think this project
and a lot of performative-based works do is to emphasise the current obsession
with documentation. The beauty of this project was its 'durational' quality,
being the definable and seductive characteristic of performance art.
Performance begs the questions - does is need documentation, and does there need
to be an outcome? - and that is why wording was so important within this
project. The performances were not a means to an end, the last performance was
not the finale, it was 'Culminating' because A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE not only
remains alive in the minds of the artists, curators, team and most importantly
participators/audience, but it has a life after Dundee when it moves onto
London's RCA. It leaves me and Katie asking:- was the vibrancy of the week’s
multiple scheduled but disorderly performances not enough, should there be an
exhibition?
Sam Belinfante in the first of three Open Rehearsal's in the Cooper Gallery
Above: Sam and Bruce McLean at the City Square Open Rehearsal
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