By Bryn Foreman
I was nervous when I sat down in class for the second week of Curatorial Practices. I had, of my own volition, signed up to do a spotlight presentation on Deborah Bright’s 2001 article, “Shopping the Leftovers: Warhol’s Collecting Strategies in Raid the Icebox I.” Better to just get it out of the way early, I’d thought to myself the previous week. Here we go.
Bright’s article takes a look at the 1969 exhibition at the Museum of Art of the Rhode Island School of Design, or RISD, wherein for the first time, the institution invited a prominent artist, Andy Warhol, to curate an exhibition from their collection. Warhol enthusiastically raided the collection, creating large piles and stacks of chairs, parasols, shoes, and paintings (as long as they were fake). The show was condescended to by the elite,picketed by students, and eventually forgotten by almost everyone – there are only some show fliers saved in RISD archives. Now, however, Raid the Icebox serves as a subversive example of how curatorial power can be wielded.
The theme of this week’s class was “Artist as Curator/Curator as Artist,” and Raid the Icebox is just one of many examples of artists and curators trying on different hats. As I listened to my classmates present on artists like Fred Wilson, and the artists-in-residence at the American Philosophical Society Museum, I realized that what this topic was really about was the idea of power – who wields power, and how.
This of course begs the questions; What is an artist? What is a curator? What sets them apart? I think Joseph Kosuth was right, the power of the curator is differentiated by the nature of having institutional validity. An artist creates meaning directly, while a curator takes “borrowed meanings” from the artworks being selected.
This topic of Artist/Curator relates to the Museum of Broken Relationships in a number of ways. Take, for example, this presentation By Olinka Vištica, one of the cofounders of MBR. She talks about how she worked in the culture industry as an artist for a number of years before preparing an art installation with her co-founder and ex, Dražen Grubišić, who is also an artist. These two artists displayed a physical object as a memory of their love as an art object, and then eventually began displaying objects from other people’s broken relationships. Olinka and Dražen are curators of the museum that they founded as artists. If that’s the case, are they still artists, in addition to being curators?
Kosuth was right about another thing – artists as curators allow for (a little bit of) the democratization of curation, something that MBR exemplifies. Historically, a curator has been someone that is well-educated, and working for a museum, giving them the validity of not one, but two institutions. Theoretically, anybody can be an artist. However, it usually requires some amount of celebrity-status to earn an invitation to curate. This is, notably, not the case with MBR – anyone can submit an object or a story to the museum. Whether or not it will be accepted is still a question, but the barrier to entry at this particular museum is still significantly lower than most.
This project is challenging for me on two fronts, and in extremely different ways. I’m interacting with both artistry and curatorship in new ways. I’ve had my own artwork displayed in both group and solo shows, and I recently started a curatorial fellowship at IUPUI, but both of these roles have been clearly defined as either artist or as curator. Power, authorship, whatever you want to call it, is shared by numerous people, including (but not limited to) my classmates. This semester’s task is a classroom-style learning experience, interacting with a highly unique museum that’s in the business of telling heartbreak stories. The stakes feel higher.
The other challenge is much more personal, and I’ll be blunt about it: this project makes me miss my friend Stacia. My object from the first class – the one we would consider donating – was a hideous black wig that I wore at a Halloween party last year. Stacia was there, and that was the beginning of my very brief friendship with her. I feel her absence in this class quite acutely, and I wonder often about what she would have to say in discussion.
The blurring of identities between Artist/Curator can be useful institutional critique, and it can also just be a really cool way to display a collection (check out the Van Abbe Museum). MBR is an ongoing example of this blurring in practice, and working with them is an exciting opportunity that poses educational, professional, and personal challenges.
Bryn Foreman is a second-year MA student in the Museum Studies Program.
