How

to write a curatorial statement

The main aim in writing a curatorial statement is to imply a great deal without actually saying very much at all. The trick is to be wantonly suggestive and at the same time to speak as indirectly as possible- if you follow these golden rules you wont go too far wrong. RULE #1 Make your title illusive and dont give anything away Writing titles for shows can be tricky but as long as you dont try and say too much you should be on safe ground. Finding a balance between snappy ad-speak or TV show informality and the name of a doctoral thesis should be your aim. It can be helpful to have a second title that makes you sound smarter after your catchy one liner e.g. Consuming Desires between ecstasy and breakfast, The Alchemists dilemma the illusions of scientism and the occult. (n.b pairing things is also a good idea from backstreet to boogie between projection and epiphany) It is also helpful to write in the present continuous such as Making the modern, Writing the subject Thinking tautologies A final tip can be adding a well known theorists name but cunningly linking it to an unlikely object as in Hegels playpen The candlestick of Plotinus or Kants pyjamas RULE #2 Avoid any speaking subject The second rule is to never show your hand or declare yourself. The danger is obvious if you say something then you might be challenged to back up your opinion, so avoid using I or We or The artists. Instead you can treat the exhibition as agency. The exhibition looks at The works collectively diffuse the time bomb of, The show addresses. You can add to this the idea that the exhibition is an argument but not in the sense that it tests of proves something but just is. Saying something like The exhibition frames an argument that is bordered on one side by lack and on the other by the palimpsest of social cohesion gives the impression that you are more like an archaeologist, and rather than being your own creation, the exhibition was always there waiting to be discovered. RULE #3 All exhibitions are investigations An exhibition should never be concrete. In a curatorial statement you should always try and avoid any teleology. Woe betide the curator who actually declares that a show means something. Remember art is about asking questions not making manifestos and curators are not declarants so the trick is to always retain a concept of inquiry. The exhibition seeks to, The show attempts a reading of or The works comprise an heuristic explication of... You can take this one stage further by implying that the exhibition is the first faltering steps on an investigation of. RULE #4 Always circle around the subject This is a useful tip in many forms of academic writing. So that you do not expose yourself to having an opinion always present the subject as an amorphous and undefined field of possible inquiry. One technique is to use equally ill-defined and nebulous terms such as The works circle around The artists are caught between tensions of being and nothingness or issues in the works are gathered around a dichotomy of self and other.

 RULE #5 Do as much as possible distance your self from the space of the institution Perverse as the logic may seem it is very important to imply that the exhibition is not held within the walls of the space housing it. The aim is to imply both that the exhibition is the first part on a longer journey and that there is an understanding of the limitation of the institution. Its hard to invoke institutional critique when one is making a show in an institution so some fast footwork is needed here. Useful ways of discussing this might include Within the space the exhibition seeks tobut at the same time it invites a wider reading of X in the social contexts of, The exhibition represents only one manifestation of the intention toat the same time we find ourselves outside of the space looking back in or The exhibition is a work in progress and later this year a publication will be prepared that. Publications are great since they imply that you will at some unmentioned time formulate something approaching an opinion without the need to suggest what that might be. RULE #6 Citation is critical to deflect attention from your own thoughts All curatorial statements need to refer to texts outside of themselves and selecting the right people to quote and quoting them in the right way is critical. Before taking on who to quote (see appendix #1) let us begin by looking at how to quote people. Again if you quote directly you run the risk of actually saying something so the best is always to distance yourself from the person you are citing. Writing a line like Ranciress reading of capital allows us to or When Deleuze addresses difference he enables is much easier to handle. One general rule of thumb is that all quotations are famous. The point is that you dont want to sound like youre trotting out some hackneyed phrase so adding assumed notoriety gets you off the hook. In Hanna Arendts famous phrase Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses we find a cipher for the.... One can go one stage further by rewriting a quote so you can get the theorist of choice to express what you want. to paraphrase Lyotard the subject is deconstructed, or rewriting Marxs epigram, a specter is haunting Europe - the specter of consumersim. RULE #7 The safest way not say anything is to ask questions This may be the most useful advice so far. By asking questions you can sound as if you know something without having to have any real knowledge whatsoever. Can an aesthetics of self stand in opposition to the oxymoron of identity politics?. Will we ever be finished with rewriting Kant? Questions are particularly useful in academic areas where you havent read. Here the trick is to dress up a question as if the subject area was second nature to you. We can ask the question that has puzzled cognitive scientists for decades, Why do people have a particular kind of intelligent behaviour. (n.b. Here again it is not you who are asking the question rather you have invoked the collective we a harmony between the viewer of the exhibition and exhibitions itself. You are completely off the hook! RULE #8 use words as short hand philosophy to show that you have read the right books This is a simple technique, you dont really need to know your subject area to imply knowledge and as long as you italicise the chosen words and imply a relation that you do not explore. The implied lack in the works positions the trace of self as abject. It is quite easy to overdo this technique and if you find that more than 28% of your text is italicised you have probably gone too far. The objet petit a,as mediated commodity fetish invokes the dasein of a polysemous subject is definitely overdoing it. RULE #9 Write politically but without politics You can safely assume that you are lined up behind the right political banner as long as you invoke a sense of righteous activism. There are two golden rules when writing with political intent; aim broad and shoot at straw targets. Dont forget curatorial practice is an armchair activity and shouldnt have you rushing to the barricades with a Molotov in each hand. You are on completely safe ground in almost all art circles as long as you lambast the great wickednesses of capitalism or social policy. One helpful tactic is to avoid the specifics of political debate. If you write about neo-liberalism for example

you shouldnt discuss it in terms of it as a particular form of economic policy or as a distinct movement of capital. Neo-liberalism should be treated as an indistinct ideology synonymous with everything that is evil, wicked and wrong. So to write something like rejecting the parochial neoliberal agenda of no-logocentrism, or this is reflected in fictional architecture and neo-liberal urban planning very neatly says very little but still implies a political engagement. The real trick is to affect the right tone of voice, and you should sound indignant and justifiably incensed by the general and never to be defined injustices dealt out to human kind and to art in particular. RULE #10 Who to attack and what to attack Basically the rules with people are quite straightforward aim at the biggest and least likely to reply. Writing about the hapless aftermath of Reaganomics or the redundant policies of Blairite escapism is much better than pinpointing something. One should absolutely avoid any active politician. Writing something like the wanton disregard paid by the current culture minister Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth is just asking for trouble. Real politics can get very messy. But as long as you are going after someone like Obama and you treat him as some sort of behemoth you will look like David against a philistine Goliath. The list of things to attack should be chosen with care but issues like globalization or commodification are guaranteed winners. Adding a little rhetorical flair is important here so you dont sound like some old journalist hack, You should sprinkle your politics with lines like as the graffiti in banlieues that reads La croissance est une folie or Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies, as Marx put it, Groucho Marx that is. Appendix #1 Who to quote? The basic rule here is go with the flow. Pick the same people that others are quoting this makes others feel comfortable and reinforces a sense that there is a theoretical zeitgeist. Antiquity is relatively safe and beyond the obvious Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, Epicurus is a good recent bet specially if youre looking for something about taste. You can safely hop over the next 900 years with the possible exception of the Arab and Persian thinkers of the first and second centuries like al-Kindi, alFarabi and Ibn Daud. A recent trend in magical and alchemical texts might have you dipping into Paracelsus but this is very easily overdone. Theres little to get worried about in the sixteenth and seventeenth century but a mention of Spinozan panthesism or Cartesian doubt can look good. Kant, Bentham, Fichte and Hegel should take care of the next 100 years. Treat Marx as an historian, Pierce as a structuralist, Luckacs as a modernist and Nietzsche as a poet. The twentieth century is much harder so you need to be careful to choose prolific writers so you minimize any risk of misquoting. If you want keep a political agenda in your work your choices need to be made with even greater attentiveness. Remember if you go wading in with an activist agenda but have a text ripe with the axioms of an old book burner like Heidegger or bits of Gadamer or Paul de Man you will definitely open your self up for attack. One surprising technique is to select your authors by letter. Rather than taking on the whole panoply of contemporary theory with months of reading confine yourself to a limited alphabetical range, the letter B for example! Bataille, Badiou, Butler, Baudrillard, Barthes, Blanchot, Bourdieu, Brger, Bhabha, Bourriaud, Benjamin, Bakhtin looks like a pretty good selection to me and would save you a lot of time you might otherwise have given to the other 25 letters. Posted: Friday, 12 March, 2010 http://www.tenstakonsthall.se/blog/how-write-curatorial-statement