The curatorial corporeal: digital dispersion of physical presence in contemporary curating practice
Historically, curating was preoccupied with the material presence of objects experienced in physical proximity to the static exhibition display. With the changing nature of contemporary art practice, characterised by performativity, discursivity and interdisciplinarity, theories of curating and in particular the expanded notion of the ‘curatorial’ as a conceptual practice have become significant fields of enquiry.
For curator and theorist Maria Lind ‘the curatorial has clear performative sides’ (1). Tracing back the notion to its emergence in other fields, it becomes clear that performativity uses acts and practices as a way of creating meaning (2). Performativity, thus, suggests active participation of the artist and the viewer. Curator and theorist of the curatorial Irit Rogoff claims that the curatorial is ‘at its best, when it is attempting to enact the event of knowledge rather than to illustrate those knowledges’ (3). Enactment directly implies performance. The meaning in the curatorial lies, thus, in embodied experience and necessitates the gesture that activates new ways of perceiving the world. For Lind, like for Rogoff, the curatorial ‘performs something ‘here and now’ instead of merely mapping something ‘there and then’’ (4). This article will explore how this situation is destabilised by the inclusion of distributive digital technologies in the curatorial framework.
The semantic move away from the more prevalent notion of curating towards the curatorial goes hand in hand with the rapid development of contemporary digital technology. Digital proximity has complicated the idea of experiencing the curatorial corporeally, while the idea of presence goes beyond physical reality. To become an object on the screen; to be physical and immaterial simultaneously; technology extends the human body, synthesising the organic with the synthetic. Does this mean that technology helps one to be more present, expanding bodily existence into virtuality? Can I assume I am present, even when leaving my corporeal being? Digital dispersion of physical presence and participation has a direct impact on human embodied existence and sensory perception in contemporary curating practice, and is waiting on a plausible theory. How might the current use of digital technology by artists and curators help us to understand what it means to be present, ‘here and now’, ‘there’, and perhaps even ‘then’? What are the effects of contemporary digital technology on working with artists or mediating their presence to the audience in curating contemporary art practice?
As a curator, I have realised the need to better understand the layered presences of subjects in the curatorial field. In my recent project, ‘do it domestic’, I experienced what it means to exist in material reality and various digital virtualities at the same moment. I was asked to respond to Czech artist and writer Jiří Kolář’s poem about a domestic museum, in order to participate in the first Polish edition of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s 'Do It' exhibition. I organised a monthly online live stream display of art objects, placed on a set of shelves in the middle of my living room in a former industrial building, Enterprise House in London Fields. The live recordings of the display in London were then projected onto an identical set of shelves, placed in the 'Do It' exhibition space in an old factory, WI-MA in Łódź, Poland. During the exhibition, I hosted four dinner parties with thirteen invited artists, for their physical presence to be part of the project as well. After every gathering, the physical objects left by the guests would constitute this always evolving display. On some occasions, artists also activated the static pieces with performances, which were projected live on top of the display.
At an international distance, in different time zones, my collaboration with artists and the curators in Poland developed through WhatsApp, YouTube and Skype, interconnecting London, Łódź and Toronto. During the live streaming sessions, I could see my feet on the floor in my London Fields apartment, with my live image synchronously appearing on the screen of the camera, the screen of the laptop in the window of the streaming software, and the YouTube live streaming windows on my phone and computer. Each of these mediated appearances belonged to different formats, through which my presence was diffused across different points in space across the earth.
The most ungraspable sensation went through my body at the moment when I suddenly saw myself acting as a projection in the physical space far away from my conscious self. My presence ceased to correspond to my real-time physical reality, due to the extreme delay of technological capture. I saw myself reflected in a different reality than I was sensing, and as a result, my physical awareness of my body moving in the material space fell apart. I was aware, but my attention travelled in space and in time. Clearly, presence belongs to the nonlinear timescale, multiple realities and spaces of experience, spreading outside of the limits of human awareness. Technology reconfigures the relationship between physicality and presence, and so in the end, enactment does not necessarily call for embodiment. Consequently, the ideas of perception, participation and presence in the curatorial need to be re-evaluated, while the interrelationship between mind and matter reinforced in practice.
The fact that to perform something ‘here and now’ does not exclude simultaneously mapping something ‘there and then’, is for me as a curator the most pressing consequence of these shifts. Performativity of the curatorial in the context of the contemporary digital technology lies exactly in this dimensional distribution of presence; the disembodied awareness of being with others; the multi-temporal and spatial connectivity; and in these moments when the distinction between virtual and physical presences collapses. Despite the shifts brought into question and the idea of presence subverted by the inclusion of distributive digital technologies into curating practice, physical embodied presence and participation in the exhibition space remains key.
These curatorial experiences have led me to claim that digital proximity and the flux of virtual affects disseminated through the screen, do not stand up to bodily multisensory experiences in the curatorial field. This claim was demonstrated by my sudden decision to stop sharing with the public the YouTube live stream links during the ‘do it domestic’ project. I understood that the real work of art did not belong to the screen and the virtuality of the online, but it was the physical experience of the solid set of shelves filled with the immaterial projected objects. To embody the digital disintegration of the contemporary idea of presence necessitates physical displacement. Digital dispersion of physical presence resulted in the experience of objects, which were not material; the experience of live performances, which were performed then, not now; and the physical encounter with matter, which was distant from the place of its actual experience.
References
1) Lind, M (2012) Performing the Curatorial. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
2) Martinon, J (2015) Theses in the Philosophy of Curating. London: Bloomsbury. pp. 25-34.
3) Rogoff, I (2013) The Expanding Field. In: The Curatorial: A philosophy of curating. Ed: Martinon, J. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 41-48.
4) Lind (2009) Maria Lind on the Curatorial. Artforum International 48 (October 2009), p. 103.
