Re: Between Beach Ball and Rubber Raft
March 26 at 5:53pm
Hi Marie,
How’s Vienna? You have no idea how much I miss it! Thanks for the kind words about the exhibition. I’m really happy and excited about it and getting to do it.
Well to answer your questions, I was asked to curate a Front Room project by Laura Fried and Anthony Huberman. This is largely because I won the Frieze Writer’s Prize last year, but doing the internship there also had a lot to do with it. By interning, they got to see how I wrote about different artists and the kind of artists I was interested in, and I got a chance to prove myself to people who really do stuff in the art world (doing the intern grunt work with a smile on my face!).
In thinking about the exhibition, it kinda came together piece by piece. I knew that Anthony and Laura curated the Front Room space as a sort of complement/2nd opinion about the shows going on in the main galleries, so I tried to throw up a couple of similar themes (in this case, humorous minimalism and performance). I then started thinking about the ways people curate shows these days. A lot of people have been playing with the idea of calling attention to the nature of exhibitions in general, or picking really unusual (poetic in nature) concepts. While I can’t say that I always agree with many of these exhibitions, I tried to be cognizant of the particulars of the space (very critical), and to use it skillfully. Then, I just started thinking about contemporary artists I really liked, and what would be an interesting way of presenting them (I really only knew what I DIDN’T want to do). I found out about Paul Lee by browsing various gallery websites (the Artforum guide is very helpful, and cuts out a lot of the fat. I also used ArtSlant), and fell in love. The emotions in Paul’s pieces spoke to me very deeply, and I knew that they would guide my interests in picking the other artists. Paul’s pieces are consumer items that refer to domesticity, so I began thinking about the space like a house, or about how houses are protective objects, interior and exterior, etc. I had found 2 other artists who had work I felt fit the existential requirement, and I started playing around with images of their works in Powerpoint (placing them together on white backgrounds). It then occurred to me to use an artist whom I had admired for a long time, in a sort of “exalted elder,” way. I wrote him directly and received an e-mail response in a couple of days, after which I contacted his gallery (This was BREYER P-ORRIDGE). With these two, the show started to take more shape. There was a romantic element to it, a sort of intense longing that I really liked. I decided I needed a video or someone who worked in more of an installation context, who could directly refer to the space. I started checking reviews on the Flash Art website (searched for body and video, literally), and found a couple of contenders (international mags are the best, btw). Steve’s work just shouted out at me and I knew I had to have him in the show. His work is funny, beautiful, and calls so much attention to the nature of time and presence that it was a must, so I wrote one of the galleries at which he had previously shown, and the director then put me in touch with him. I told him what I liked, and that I wanted him to do something site-specific, to which he eagerly replied. All the while, I just kept thinking about what words to use to describe what had become an intense bundle of emotions and subversive joy. Oh yeah, when I wrote the galleries, I told them upfront what my budget was, and they submitted works for review that could be transported on the cheap, so this thriftiness also informed the exhibition, or at least the artists I chose. Towels and DVDs have pretty inexpensive shipping costs.
I didn’t intend for this to be such a long answer, but this is how I put the show together. I was speaking with Anthony today about group shows, and he says that a curator should only do a group show every 2-3 years, because they take a LOT of time to put together conceptually. Of course, his upcoming one has like 20 artists, but eh.
Hope to see you at the museum when you get back!
Best,
William