This is an open call
for submissions for an edited volume on the artist-as-curator for an academic
press in the UK. The editor seeks submissions that theorize and/or historicize
the breakdown of traditional boundaries separating the practices of artistic creation
and curation.
Contributions to this
volume will examine events like the one staged during the 2011 Venice Biennale
when curator Bice Curiger arranged for Tintoretto’s 1594 Last Supper to be physically relocated, surrounded by contemporary
art, and recontextualized by means of explanatory text. The painting’s
restaging exemplified artist-as-curator practice. Artist-curators (who are not
necessarily active as professional curators) manipulate historic artworks in
order to generate new meanings. The artist-curator re-animates such a work by
placing it in a new media and/or environmental context, effectively using an old
object to generate new art. Such practices rose to prominence with artists’ critical
interventions into museums in the 1990s. However, institutional critique is no
longer their default rationale. Artist-curators have increasingly entered into
mutually beneficial relationships with art institutions. The curatorial
intervention at the 2011 Biennale is only one of multiple recent high-profile
instances of this strategy. When the discourse around art becomes indivisible from
the work itself, contemporary art—which possesses no history as yet—may be
disadvantaged. Does the rise of the artist-curator suggest that contemporary
art occupies a place of diminishing significance? How does the re-animation of
canonic works create new niches for twenty-first century creativity?
The volume will survey artist-curator activities thematically,
geographically, and through in-depth treatments of key figures and events. Submissions
should address curatorial interventions by individuals or collectives that make
art by re-presenting historically invested artworks in new contexts. Proposals
that examine the activities of artists acting as curators and/or curators
acting as artists in the contemporary moment are welcome. Submissions that
historicize the figure of the artist-curator by examining earlier instances of
this dynamic in the 19th and 20th centuries are also
encouraged, as are submissions that consider this phenomenon in non-Western
contexts. Articles might address topics including the
following:
*how artist-curators’
restagings of historic exhibitions have been ideologically invested
*how artist-as-curator
/ curator-as-artist activities relate to the legacy of site-specificity in the
neo-avant-garde
*how the re-animation
of historical artworks has been impacted by the exponential increase in global
image population and the widespread recognition of a contemporary postmedium
condition
*how artist-curator
practices have been influenced by the late twentieth / early twenty-first
century proliferation of art biennales and the emergence of the celebrity
curator
*how artist-curators
in the global South have sought to situate historical artworks within
nationalist discourse by seeking the virtual restaging and/or repatriation of
such works to their sites of origin
Proposals for articles
on related themes will also be considered. Please submit the following via
email attachment by November 15th, 2013:
1. A 200 to 500 word abstract outlining
your proposed book chapter; 2. A 200 to 400 word biography describing your
scholarly background and your engagement with this topic;
3. A CV. Send all
inquiries and submissions to Gabrielle Gopinath, Ph.D., School of the Art
Institute of Chicago, at gabrielle.gopinath (at) aya.yale.edu
