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CURATOR-ARTIST

CURATOR-ARTIST / THE ARTIST AS CURATOR — CURATING AS GENERATIVE PRACTICE

CENTRAL QUESTION

WHO / WHAT CREATES THE CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH ART CAN EMERGE?

Curating is understood as curatorial dramaturgy: organising who can appear, where, for how long, under what material and economic conditions, with which resources, degree of freedom, rules, risks, care structures, documentation and afterlife.

CURATION DOES NOT MERELY ORGANISE ARTWORKS. CURATION ORGANISES CONDITIONS OF POSSIBILITY.

THREE DISTINCT POSITIONS

Do not erase professional differences. Thanos is not simply an artist-curator; Obrist and Goldberg are not artists merely because curating can be authorial.

HISTORICAL GENEALOGY — KEPT PRIMARILY HERE

The transformation accelerating in the 1960s–70s includes dematerialisation, conceptual art, instructions, publications, actions, situations, temporary constellations and overlapping artist/curator/publisher/producer/educator roles.

MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ / MAI — CURATING STATES OF PRESENCE

Marina’s medium shifts from her own body, to audience/participant, to a transferable method and set of conditions. The question becomes:

WHAT CONDITIONS MUST BE CREATED SO THAT ANOTHER BODY CAN EXPERIENCE SOMETHING?

The Marina Abramović Institute was imagined as a building in Hudson, with Rem Koolhaas; a 2013 Kickstarter campaign exceeded its target, with Lady Gaga’s workshop/video increasing visibility. Asbestos and escalating costs made the building unsustainable. Thanos’s financial analysis supported abandoning it. MAI became immaterial and nomadic:

DON’T COME TO US. WE COME TO YOU.

The institution becomes a method rather than monument, working in São Paulo, Ukraine, Istanbul and Athens. Karyes is a permanent working base and centre for artistic process, not the end of nomadism.

Cleaning the House / Abramović Method

It can be understood as a continuous artwork, a preparatory method for stamina/concentration/attention/long duration, and a curatorial-pedagogical apparatus. The method curates the state of the body.

MAI does not maintain a rigid artist/participant or audience distinction. Participants enter time, silence, stillness, attention, repetition and deceleration. Participation is physiologically curated.

In 512 Hours (Serpentine), initially empty rooms and facilitators/protocols reorganised behaviour through slowness, headphones, walls, rice/lentils, platforms, rest and attention. What remains is time, body, protocol, relation and attention. Gates and Portals shows that Marina can be physically absent while the method continues organising visitors.

CURATING ≠ CHOOSING WHAT THE AUDIENCE WILL SEE. CURATING = PREPARING WHAT THE BODY WILL BE CAPABLE OF EXPERIENCING.

PAULA GARCIA — RADICAL CORPOREALITIES / CURATING CONDITIONS OF AFFECT

Paula is simultaneously performance artist, curator, researcher and MAI collaborator. Her article “Corporalidades Radicais: Como Espaços Além da Pele / Radical Corporealities: As Spaces Beyond the Skin” forms part of doctoral research on producing the body in presence, centred on Corpo Ruído #9 (2023), especially sound.

Radical corporeality is not simply an extreme body defined by pain or endurance. The body ceases to be a closed container ending at the skin and becomes a field of relations reorganised by sound, magnetism, industrial matter, weight, performers, spectators, social forces and technology.

In Corpo Ruído #9, Paula wears a customised metal structure with neodymium magnets. Collaborators place or throw nails and industrial metal fragments toward the magnetised body. Matter accumulates; the body becomes heavy, restricted, unstable and partially immobilised; the structure breaks/material falls/body rests; the process begins again. A five-day Southbank Centre version lasted approximately 30 hours:

ACCUMULATION → WEIGHT → INSTABILITY → BREAKING POINT → REST → REPETITION.

The work is defined by precariousness, uncertainty and risk, not mastery. The body negotiates with forces without knowing how much matter will adhere, when pieces will fall or when balance will fail.

Sound is the central relational agent: metal, impact, friction and collapse are captured and amplified beyond Paula’s skin into the spectator’s body:

BODY → METAL → VIBRATION → AMPLIFICATION → AUDIENCE BODY.

Drawing on Gumbrecht’s production of presence, sonic instability creates present-tense attention. Magnetism is an actual material model of invisible force and opens toward social forces.

Relevant thinkers in Paula’s field include Achille Mbembe, Angela Davis, Suely Rolnik, Vilém Flusser, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Paul B. Preciado. Paula’s article asks how aesthetic procedures produce ethics and politics in the sensible dimension. Politics enters through how bodies are affected, sound travels, weight accumulates, force becomes perceptible and spectators are disturbed.

After meeting Marina in São Paulo, Paula researched and organised the Brazil itinerary for The Space in Between, including healers, mediums, ritual practices, ayahuasca contexts, Chapada Diamantina and crystal mines. She co-curated Terra Comunal (2015) and has taught Cleaning the House since 2018.

Clarisse’s analytical connection, not Paula’s own terminology: radical corporeality at the scale of one body can conceptualise curatorial corporeality at the scale of a group. Curation becomes organising relations of attention, proximity, risk, material, sound, time, care and participation.

THANOS ARGYROPOULOS — CURATORIAL CONDITIONS / ECONOMICS, FREEDOM, LEGACY & REFUSAL

This node is based on Clarisse’s interview with Thanos, not a biography. His medium is the invisible condition under which art remains possible.

Thanos’s primary training is clinical psychology, with secondary financial economics. His empirical and rigorous approach rejects the assumption that psychology, economics, art and performance are naturally separate; disciplinary separation is partly a power structure producing disconnection. His current economic/policy advisory work, including health/mental health and culture, is not separate from artistic practice.

He identifies three dimensions of Marina: artist; carrier/guardian of performance art; educator. Her educational legacy may be as important as or more important than her public artistic legacy. Legacy becomes transmission of conditions for making, not only preservation of masterpieces.

Commitment is a state of mind, not temporary project management. It requires alignment among values, emotion, action and political position. Legacy is not an estate: estate preserves assets, rights and property; legacy is relational and distributed through memory, resonance, human networks and enabled transmission. Institutions and artists can become bottlenecks.

Desire and affordance

Obrist’s unrealised-project question reveals desire and institutional limitation. Thanos’s counter-principle begins from what is available and makes possibility flourish from it:

CURATION MOVES BETWEEN DESIRE AND AFFORDANCE. Purpose → clarity → action.

MAI phases and refusal

An early North Star was places in transition at moments of fragility—Brazil (2015), Athens, Kyiv, Istanbul. Fragility may allow art to enter different relations with community; context and dissemination matter.

A later phase investigated time, space, human connection and architecture, including Amsterdam and Southbank/London. Tender, vulnerable, human-scale works inside brutalist environments show that architecture modifies perception of the body.

The current focus is process before show: Cleaning the House, artist development and commissions. Visibility is not automatically success. Not all silence is the same: not making a show can be meaningful institutional silence when conditions do not permit meaningful dialogue. Refusal is a curatorial tool.

MAI’s nomadism resists centralisation and Eurocentrism. Performance histories include New York, Amsterdam, Mexico City, India, African contexts and local networks. The building’s abandonment becomes compatible with refusing the performance-art temple/mausoleum. Work should happen where relevant and necessary, sometimes where conceived.

Labour, suppression and culture as public good

Working conditions are part of the work: compensation, living conditions, production values, communication and crediting. Suppression occurs through banality/being ignored, denial, or conditions that say yes without allowing meaningful existence. The most disturbing form is anticipatory self-censorship—stillborn works dying at conception because artists predict refusal. Power enters imagination.

Incremental budget compromises can blunt institutional mission without explicit political orders. Art should provoke thought, challenge moral conceptions, register history, provide conceptual tools and create spaces for processing change. Culture produces social/economic value and public funding reflects public-good logic rather than anomaly.

Care must include the participant. Rhythm 0 shows that participant behaviour can become violent and that security, intervention and removal may be justified. Care does not automatically destroy artistic freedom. Thanos distinguishes pain from violence and asks what a society acknowledges or refuses to acknowledge.

Institutional art involves compromise; leadership distinguishes compromises that allow work to exist from compromises that destroy its signal. Ticketing is a curatorial/ethical device: a ticket redefines participation, and repeated access to durational work becomes economically stratified. Economics can alter the ontology of spectatorship.

Thanos’s three artistic references are Marina Abramović (directness and relief from overthinking), Jerzy Grotowski (Akropolis, Art as Vehicle, Via Negativa and truth), and John Cage (attention and mental framing).

THE BUDGET IS DRAMATURGICAL. ACCESS IS DRAMATURGICAL. INSTITUTIONAL SILENCE IS DRAMATURGICAL. LOCATION IS DRAMATURGICAL. CONDITIONS OF LABOUR ARE DRAMATURGICAL.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST — CURATOR AS ENABLER

Based primarily on Ways of Curating. Obrist is not reduced to interviewing artists. Curating is connection, conversation, enabling, network, experiment, memory, distribution and care.

Curating creates provisional, revisable maps connecting artists, disciplines, cities, histories, ideas and audiences. It opens routes and allows cultural pollination: things previously separated enter relation. The curator must not use a brilliant concept to turn artists into evidence; exhibition should grow through conversation and encounter.

The unrealised-project question, developed through Boetti, is a research tool, desire detector and institutional critique. Unrealised works form an archive of the possible—forgotten, censored, impossible, misunderstood, economically blocked or technically premature. Curating studies what failed to exist.

Do it uses instructions as distributed curatorial form. Authorship, originality and artist presence destabilise; a score is realised elsewhere and changes with site, material, participant, culture and interpretation. Viewer becomes executor/interpreter/performer. There is no original/copy binary: context is part of actualisation.

Glissant’s mondialité supports local/global relation without homogenisation. Collections produce knowledge through finding, acquiring, organising, storing and juxtaposing. Wunderkammern place art, science, nature and curiosity in one epistemic environment. Idea, score, instruction, archive and conversation can survive instead of a permanent object.

Conversation is research medium: interviews are soil; exhibitions are current crop; publications are preserved harvest. History resists forgetting and records exhibition histories that disappear faster than objects.

Obrist’s first exhibition in his kitchen established exhibition without spectacle: domesticity, proximity, conversation and low infrastructure. The curator mediates without overpowering signature. Fénéon’s curator-as-catalyst counters curator-as-genius.

Dorner, Hultén and Suzanne Pagé support museum as laboratory/power station. Pagé combines guardian of memory with laboratory and artist-led reactivation. Laboratorium (1999, with Barbara Vanderlinden) asked what scientist laboratory and artist studio share, connecting scientists, artists, dancers, writers and citizens; maps and bicycles extended the exhibition into Antwerp. A think tank preceded the exhibition. Latour: laboratory, hospital, studio and museum are epistemic apparatuses; space + protocol determine knowledge. Stengers/Galileo: theory and experiment co-produce staged proof.

The Book Machine created daily pages during Laboratorium: approximately 300 spreads, 6,000 images and 18,500 text characters. Documentation became process. Carsten Höller makes perplexity and doubt curatable. An exhibition is not an illustration; it can produce reality and function as research.

Xavier Le Roy’s contaminated body blurs biography, theory, science, dance, lecture and performance. Utopia Station provides temporary social infrastructure—stage, dancefloor, meeting/resting space; people listen, talk, sleep, daydream and eat. To the Moon via the Beach transforms an amphitheatre with sand, whose later reuse gives material a curatorial lifecycle and ecological responsibility.

Whole Earth Catalog models access to tools; internet platforms make users editors/curators while overproduction makes selection more important. 89plus is research network, conference, book, periodical, exhibition, open call and platform: infrastructure for emergence.

Curare ↔ care means attending, sustaining, connecting, preserving possibilities and thinking long-term without paternalism.

ROSELEE GOLDBERG / PERFORMA — HISTORY AS COMMISSIONING INFRASTRUCTURE

Source status: no complete copy of Goldberg’s book was located in the accessible files. This combines documented publication structure, publisher/MoMA material, Performa archive and public curatorial documentation; it is not a line-by-line extraction of an unavailable PDF.

Goldberg trained as a dancer; doctoral research at the Courtauld examined Oskar Schlemmer and Bauhaus performance. She directed the Royal College of Art Gallery (1972–75) and worked at The Kitchen (1978–80), where video, music, dance and performance intersected. She combines scholar, curator, organiser and former dancer.

Her 1979 survey, later Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, traces Futurism, Russian Futurism/Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Bauhaus, living art, conceptual practice, media generations and global 21st-century performance. Performance is not a late oddity but recurs when artists break media/institutions, redefine artist/audience and alter art/life relations.

Futurism makes art event through manifesto, noise, provocation and movement; Dada uses cabaret, nonsense, sound poetry, costume, chance and anti-masterpiece; Bauhaus investigates body, geometry, costume, space, mechanical movement and light; Black Mountain/Cage/Cunningham bridge chance, music, movement, visual art and event toward Happenings, Fluxus and Intermedia. In the 1960s–70s performance becomes the material execution of an idea and the body becomes site, material and political field.

Goldberg’s historical writing creates continuity among artists separated by medium, country, discipline and generation. Performance Now frames performance as visual art, global language/world citizenship, radical political action, dance after choreography, new theatre and performing architecture: a transversal logic infecting other media.

Goldberg founded Performa in 2004; its first biennial was 2005, built around visual-art performance. Its commissioning model invites visual artists to create new live work. In Jesper Just’s True Love Is Yet to Come (2005), Goldberg proposed opera to an artist whose practice was primarily video/film and who had not made live performance. Curating triggers a medium shift.

In Francis Alÿs’s Rehearsal II (2005), a pianist, soprano and striptease performer repeatedly rehearse Schubert in a Lower East Side burlesque club; each musical stop makes the stripper stop and dress. More than two hours of repetition, failure, production and delay become a live temporal apparatus. The medium defines itself through process.

100 Years, curated with Klaus Biesenbach around the centenary of the 1909 Futurist Manifesto, moves historical research from book to display/archive/event. Goldberg’s trajectory is:

WRITE THE HISTORY → MAKE IT VISIBLE → BUILD AN INSTITUTION → COMMISSION THE NEXT CHAPTER.

Performa’s archive preserves text, photographs, video, audio, production documents, credits and curatorial information, acknowledging the paradox: the live event disappears while institutional afterlife becomes denser. Keep conceptual relations to Phelan, Auslander, Jones and Schneider in Notes.

DOROTHEA VON HANTELMANN — HOW ART DOES THINGS

Primary home remains Curator-Artist. How to Do Things with Art develops through Austin’s performative language and Butler’s performativity. The question is not only what artwork represents but what it does by existing inside social conventions.

Art can act through museum conventions concerning history, progress, value, authorship, duration, ownership and spectatorship. The museum is part of the artwork’s performative effect. Conventions restrict but also become modifiable through repetition. This is useful for Tino Sehgal: works inhabit the museum while refusing object production, documentation and conventional sale procedures; institution becomes part of medium.

COUNTERPOINTS

CURATOR-ARTIST — CENTRAL SYNTHESIS

CURATING BECOMES A FORM OF DRAMATURGY. Its materials include time, space, people, money, attention, access, conversation, rules, contracts, documentation, memory, refusal and care.