Vocabulary

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The being-curator takes place in the middle of a contradictory web of relations. How to think through these contradictions while being implicated in them? A point of entry is the Blind Spot: It is a point on our retina where the optical nerve passes through in the sake of seeing. This physiological condition for blindness equals us human beings as it distinguishes us. It incompletes our subjectivities as entities, but activates a becoming-subject through relation. Not that ‘you’ and ‘me,’ ‘now’ and ‘then,’ ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’ cease to exist but the in-between – the and – would indicate a relation that unfolds a complicated time-space of blinding. This would throw us into an arena of the curatorial, full of ambivalences, which is a space of asynchronous temporalities. While curatorial practice might help us a to program a particularly located event in public, blinding makes us entering a moment of darkness or overexposure where we loose control and orientation. It is urgently needed, because, “ … an image is never an image, but a contradiction of images. And it's the same for a sound. Okay. We return to the just contradiction within the people, reflected in their representation. No, not representation, but presentation. Not a show, but a struggle.” (Jean-Luc Godard, Le Gai Savoir, 1968/69).

Blinding contradicts with curating because it is a way to undo exhibiting, though without a withdrawal of appearance. Blinding is an example of a sliding word, the black between images of a film, the white between letters in a text, the silence between sounds of words, and the span between action and manifestation. Blinding can neither be reified nor replaced nor represented. It is because, in the moment of exposure, blinding escapes as a creative vigor. It is a moment in which 'exhibiting' is not there yet but when it might be constituted. That is to say, blinding also might help us to detect and disturb the conditions in which 'meaning' emerges. Or to word it differently: While the Blind Spot is a point of entry into a contradictory relation, blinding is a moment of danger that crashes the foundations of meaning. (Doreen Mende, 2010)

As we enter the curatorial as a field of research, two points have resonated with me during our group discussions: First, is the parallel between research and the curatorial which allows us to think about the curatorial as a point of order and a point of pause, and second is the paradox that this duality presents us with, as we set out on a path that carries with it the insecurities of not knowing our destination. Derrida uses the word fermata for points of pause, which in music is the notation that indicates that a note should be sustained for longer than its note value would indicate. Exactly how much longer it is held is up to the discretion of the performer or conductor. Rather than leaving us suspended or in suspense, it is possible, I believe, to highlight these points of pause as a kind of praxis. A ‘doing’ that in the moment of research indicates a hesitation as well as a decision. A point of pause, that is not about casting off limits, but is about navigating through certain limitations.

An insistence on pursuing research that at the same time avoids the traps of assurances along the way: the “disguised re-centering”, “the hegemony of a problematic” – to use Derrida’s words – that convince us that we are indeed on the right path. (Sarah Pierce, 2010)

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I am interested in the notion of interruption and intensification both as co-joining, complementary terms and as oppositional ones. Quite simply, interruption could be seen as the process of pausing and gathering up that the making public of an idea or group of ideas, propositions and practices (such as an exhibition might be) with intensification being a cogent part of that process as well as what might result. However, the opposition between the two terms provides interesting questions for consideration, particularly if we think of them around the idea of “the event” where a Deleuzian model suggests the event as moments of intensification within a continual and continuing process of becoming – that is, as a continuity of the subject’s becoming without interruption. Yet interruption of course provides us with the possibility of an outside space – a space for something new to emerge and for change to take place.

I am interested, then, to think of the opportunities and problems that this idea of “interruption” as well as the introduction of an “outside” pose for us in respect of the relation field that is the shared language of art practices. (Bridget Crone, 2010)

The term ‘rebellion’, as I understand it, extends beyond the usual uprisings and oppositions, and offers instead inhabitations of knowledge production that involve unsettled, restless, and unpredictable ways of knowing. Rebellion undoes the received knowledge about much Conceptual art from the 1970s, namely its focus on object and medium, and instead provides new ways of knowing. I am particularly interested thinking rebellion through collective features of the gestural described by Agamben as “being-in-a-medium of human beings.” As gesture, rebellion disperses through encounters that are just that—in a Deleuzian sense—something in the world that “forces us to think.” Rebellion arises out of experience and through its emergence the possibilities for knowledge extend beyond a given framework, situation, or predetermined output. (Sarah Pierce, 2010)