By Gao Shiming

I

In discussing curating, we must begin with the space in which we are currently standing: the museum.

The museum is an organ of modernity; it preserves history and creates the past. Modernity develops continuously, thereby creating outmoded and expired modernity. Even as an important social organ of modernity, the museum has already been deemed"outmoded." In fact, the very idea of becoming outmoded is the ideological product of modernity.However, the predicament of the museum does not lie in whether or not it is outmoded. The problem is actually the fact that we feel the void left by the muse.When the concept of the muse was abandoned, the fine art world built by eighteenth century aesthetics (the study of perception)  collapsed, and "modern"art became subjectified, formalized, conceptualized, and politicized. Curating developed with these “Four Modernizations."

The museum is not only a space for preserving objects; it is also a space for presenting objects. Most importantly, it is a space for constructing meaning.In my view, the core issues of twentieth century museums are the anxieties of historicism and systemic judgment. That is to say, the museum simultaneously collects and evaluates art, dissolving and building art history. The museum simultaneously rebels against and creates its era.

The anxiety of museums is related to curating today. Museums exist in this state of double anxiety, so a curator cannot simply be a caretaker and conserver of the precious objects in the museum; he must also be a destroyer and producer. The curator continuously challenges and criticizes the construction of meaning by the museum, showing us that "contemporary"is only quicksand and that all historical meaning is continually being built on a foundation of sand. The construction of meaning by a museum is like an open pit mine. Things are used as soon as they are unearthed, without any period for reflection. As museums dig, they build houses over the holes.

The earliest curators were the salon organizers of eighteenth century Europe. In this sense, I might half-jokingly say that the organizers of the Orchid Pavilion Gathering, the owners of Ming dynasty gardens, and even officials in the Tang and Song Ministry of Rites arranging celebrations and ceremonies were the curators of the ancient world. Of course, this is a little bit funny, because curators in the modern sense emerged as the museum system was built. For a long period of time, curators were only one link in museum administration. When Harald Szeeman transformed Documenta from a "100 Day Museum” into a "I00 Day Event," he showed the true power and determination of the curator.

In an extreme sense, the enemies of curators are museums' public education departments, because the very existence of this department presumes that the viewer does not understand art and requires another intermediary to guarantee that an object is understood. Art does not need a body of legitimized knowledge to exist; art continually dismantles knowledge that was thought to be legitimate. Exhibitions and artworks should be experienced, not explained. Of course, this experience is not limited to observation; reading is also an experience, and often a very deep one. You might ask, "If I can read lying in bed at home, why do I need to read in a museum?” Then, I might ask, "If you can watch TV shows on your mobile phone on the subway, why can't you read in a  museum?" In a museum, you can do more than just read; you can also see a film, watch a play, discuss important issues, or even have a date.

In addition to the static objects, the museum also contains moving people. Today's museums are Rubik’s cube-like places that form a relationship between the individual " viewer" and the "object" at which he gazes, between the self and the other, between people and objects, and between people. Thus, artworks in a museum are the objects of our gaze and the starting points for our fantasies; they are mirrors reflecting contact between people.

Mucus can be places for social interaction, debate, relaxation, ideological combat., and even political discussion. However, it is important to change the relationships of spectatorship. With the increased power and intervention of the curator, museums transcended their roles as presentation spaces, and gradually became sites for the production of art.In this sense, museums are becoming studios and workshops, as well as the spaces in which certain social agendas are realized; museums have become theaters for film and drama, classrooms, auditoria, and parliaments.

From a contemporary art perspective, China's earliest bits of curating were promoted by critics in the 1980s, and the rest was performed by the artists themselves.Curating in the 1980s and 1990s was simple, direct, and devoid of fancy discourse, but still very powerful.Today, the art world abounds with curators, but the vast majority of them are merely the facilitators and middlemen of the art consumption system. As exhibition organizers and promoters, they may not even be conscious of their positions as intermediaries.

In 2003, the China Academy of Art esbalished China’s first curatorial program. We called the institution the Research Center for Visual Culture, which is academically rooted in visual studies, discourse and criticism, ideological analysis, and cultural studies.From a curatorial perspective, nothing is outside of art history, because art history and social history cannot be separated. Art is a document and a signal within the larger world of social interaction, so I believe that, if you want to shake up the world, do not shake up the art world.

With this in mind, I reorganized the China Academy of Art curating major as the Institute of ContemporaryArt and Social Thought in 2010, and placed it under the School of Inter-Media Art. With this organizational change, curatorial students had access to great artists and teachers like Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi,Yao Dajun, Qiu Zhijie, Wang Jianwei, Mou Sen, and Yang Fudong. This change also allowed them to learn and grow with artists their own age, so the ideas of curatorial students became intertwined with and encouraged by artistic practice. In this educational system, curating and contemporary art can be seen as ways of promoting deeper thought about society. As a result, we invited noted scholars and thought leaders to teach, including Chen Guangxing. SunGe, Chen jiaying. Lu Xinghua, Huang Sunquan, HeZhaotian, Sarat Maharaji. and Johnan Hartie. Historical contexts, an awareness of key issues, and the position of the speaker became frameworks for student self-examination and social and historical feelings became topics for study. Curating became an intellectual hub connecting contemporary art and social thought; shaking up perception and thought often produced imagination and action.

After more than ten years of practice and study. I have formulated a personal understanding of curating.I think that curatorial work can be largely divided in to three layers:

1. Using artworks to construct an argument and produce an awareness of key issues. This awareness or debate does not take place only in the art world, but also in the rest of society. Curators want to make things public.

2. Building critical and creative contexts or circumstances for production. Art criticism and creation are interlaced. All creation is built on criticism, and only if there is creation can we transcend political and theoretical criticism to reach art criticism. The second layer of curating is the construction of contexts, or curatorial situations, such that production and mobilization take place in this curatorial situation.

3. Proposing social projects. A curator proposes an idea to society, thereby giving birth to a social project. On this level, curating is an intellectual social movement.

Curators want to create a situation. In this sense, the core of curating is social. It does not simply play a role in a specific circle or social group; it must engage with society as a whole. Today, curating must first be political in order to be social. Curators make things public, but not using the methods of propaganda  or advertising; they want to produce a different kind of space. In fact, the best curating and the best artworks will re-divide a single society into multiple social groups, gradually splitting a homogenized, conceptualized, and abstracted audience into its component groups.

Here, I want to differentiate two kinds of exhibitions.The first is centered on a theme. Artists and artworks are placed within an existing conceptual framework; each artwork has a role to play in the theme and sub-themes of a section,  as it is placed in its category. Another kind of curating does not allow the artwork to rest, laying bare the processes of production and socialization. Here, works are allowed to quarrel and fight, disturbing each other at a temporary, dynamic gathering, thereby inspiring emotion and rebelling against set meanings. Using the words of political philosophy, the former is policy, and the latter is politics.

If a curator wants to cast off police in favor of politics, he must intervene in artistic production and art historical evolution. (In my view, this evolution is a later construction and somewhat illusory.)The curator must also use real art actions to help shape historical sensibilities and social awareness.The curator must use event-hood to dissect and rebuild an artwork's object-hood, which solidifies the intersections, collisions, reflections, and reverberations of symbols and desires, as well as ideas and feelings, between the author and the viewers, the individual and the group. In this sense, artists and curators are partners and enemies that facilitate and encourage each other.

II

Why are artists and curators both friends and enemies? First, curators must learn from artists. I have learned a lot from my artist friends, and I often repeat the things I have learned from artists. First, Wu Shanzhuan said, "Art is the reason I do other things.” Second, Huang Yongping said, "Creativity cannot exist in vacuum," Third, Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-Jensaid, "All values are worth fighting for." Over the years, these words have often stirred my heart.

I want to talk about my relationships with a few artists. I have been a curator for many years, and the most important I have learned is that every curator needs long-term relationships with artists. These artists are your colleagues and compatriots.

All of my relationships with these artists are different.With Huang Yongping, I have worked hard to be a good reader. I have confidence that I can become a good reader for him because I feel if we are stranded in a boat run aground on the continental shelf of Chinese history. Although I did not start the journey, I can bob along the waves. In the early 1980s, Huang Yongping had already hit upon some very important ideas; his artworks are tightly intertwined with these ideas, such that they are interchangeable yet inseparable. I find both greatly inspiring. He has always traveled great intellectual distances. In I 981, when the contemporary art world was still debating issues of style, he pointed out that these issue of style, whether abstract or figurative or expressionist, were all “quarrels in a little world.” What he cared about was why art was called art, and why somethings were considered outside of art. At that time, he started to completely rethink the art system, and move toward Dada, but this name only served as a shorthand. After he went to Europe, his ‘severed tongue" became a "loosened tongue.” I cannot describe it all here, but I have learned a great deal in Huang Yongping's studio. We often note "the blending of application and essence," but Huang's core working method is application as essence.”

The younger Yang Fudong is another of my long-time artist friends. I am a good buddy and a good observer. Reading and observing are different, as the latter carries an entirely different set of emotions and attitudes. In 2008, I was preparing for the Third Guangzhou Triennial, "Farewell to Post-Colonialism,"and I invited Yang Fudong to create a new work, which was "Cyan Qilin." When he shot "Seven Inellectuals in the Bamboo Forest 4," he traveled through a small village in Shandong. In this vllage, he saw countless stone sculptures. What first excited him was this scene, and we know that Yang excels at presenting spectacles.' When he returned the village and began to talk to the stone cutters and sculptors, he discovered that they inspired him. He was moved by the artisans’ simplicity, hard work, and sincerity, so he wanted to make a documentary. After two weeks, his concept changed again. He discovered that documentaries could not really delve into reality, which is contrary to popular belief. Generally, we think that in-depth interviews in documentaries are the way to represent reality. However, Yang would rather retreat to a painter's viewpoint; he felt that observing these scenes of labor and the lives of these stone workers were like a painter surveying a landscape. From a cultural studies perspective, this is incorrect, because the village and these stoneworkers cannot be painted. However, Yang took this step back; documentaries want to move forward, but he still moved back to transform the seemingly indescribable, complex, and multifaceted nature of daily life, which resonates with societal morality and ethics, into a landscape.

Yang Fudong, Blue Kylin, 2009, Multi-channel film ©Copyright ShanghART Gallery

Yang Fudong, Blue Kylin, 2009, Multi-channel film ©Copyright ShanghART Gallery

He presented the work In two space, one white, one black. The black box contained a massive video projection of an unbearably slow long-distance shot. It looks like a still photograph of a cliff but if you look closely, you will discover that there are several tiny figures moving in the landscape, but you are still not sure what they are doing. When you are nearly tired of this nearly motionless scene, you are surprised by an explosion. The tiny figures are actually placing explosives and blowing up a part of the mountain, because the cliff is a quarry. Yang represents the laying and igniting of the explosives in real time, showing the landscape on a loop. For me, the silent mountain panorama, the ten minutes of staring at it, and the surprising explosion creates a sense of awe. The second space was the white box, with a stone pillar laid in the center. The massive pillar was unfinished, or it had already been broken, and lying next to it was a qilin, also broken into several parts. This was an unfinished draft, and the artisan seemed to have left the carving incomplete after outlining the figure on the granite. This half-finished piece had a blueorint, but was never completed. These two separate, incomplete monuments are like the corporeal body of the nation, lying severed in the exhibition hall. There are. few screens on the surrounding walls showing the artisans, who appear like tomb guardians alongside a grave. Their images play for a minute, and you can feel them breathing, but they stand there like statues, staring back at you.

I think this was a pivotal piece in Yang's oeuvre, where his beautiful early images became considerations of simplicity. More importantly. from this point onward, I think that a larger spiritual force emerged. From the story of "Cyan Qilin," I learned how to be an observer. Observers or researchers can delve deeper into this world.

My third long-term artist friend is Wu Shanzhuan. For Wu, l am an appreciator. Last year, he held an exhibition entitled "What a Form: A Reportage” at OCAT Shenzhen. There,Wu was not an artist, but a reporter. I was not a curator, but a joint reporter. In the last few years, Wu has gradually turned away from what we often think of as an artist's work, so his exhibition was called “What a Form: A Reportage.” He was not making artworks, and he realized very early on that he was not making art, but "Wu's things"and "no things." They are very difficult to name, so this report was about a nameless "something." I was willing to serve as an appreciator and a joint reporter for Wu Shanzhuan, "Wu's things," or "name-less somethings."

My fourth artist friend is Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-Jen. With him, I want to be an interlocutor and comrade. Why an interlocutor? Because of our different historical contexts and viewpoints, we can effectively concentrate on one another. Why a comrade? Because we have a lot in common in terms of political and theoretical views.

Since 2008, I have organized six discussions for Chen Chieh-Jen. He lives in Taipei, and every time he does one of these discussions, he would pull out a Google Map. That Google Map presented a small portion of Taipei, an extremely small corner of this world,However, in this corner, you can see symptoms of nearly all the ideologies of the Cold War; colonialism, and globalization. All of these things were manifest within a square kilometer near his home. There was the Martial Law Department, where political prisoners were tried and imprisoned. There was a Western company building, where the CIA trained anti-Communist forces. There was an abandoned factory, one of the ruins constantly produced by globalized manufacturing. Next to that was a military dependents' village, a physical reminder of the cross-strait separation. Next to that was a slum, which housed foreign workers marginalized in Taiwanese society. Mainland Chinese artists often mock Chen’s map, because they believe it simply represent an island dweller's identity crisis, which is unrelated to us. I stubbornly promoted these dialogues with Chen because I believe that these situations are related tome, to the point that I believe them to be my issues, our issues. If this mainland side to the story did not exist, then I would have been incomplete because aa of the issue or colonization, the Cold War, or globalization are our common historical  maladies. We must be interlocutors and comrades, because we have the same historical fate and politecal predicament, Both of these transcend what is commonly called "the Taiwan Straits issue." In 2010, Chen gathered all of his artworks together into "My Guerrilla Style Art Project". I think this project was very important, and I truly hope that mainland Chinese artists and curators will learn more about it.

Chen Chieh-Jen’s work, "My Guerrilla Style Art Project"

Chen's actors are not professionals; the majority are friends involved in social movements, Some are college students, a few are ordinary dock workers, and still others are union organizers, All of the actors are his friends, from what he calls "a society of friends,"The way in which this society of friends learns from each other and helps each other is truly wonderful,Chen Chieh-Jen's videos and social movements are refractive. They are not reflexive or reflective; they are refractive, The energy of real issues and real movements enter his artworks, He refracts reality in his art, transforming it into a starting point for a new movement. Therefore, I think politics and poetry can redeem one another.

I have talked about a few famous artists, and some people might think that I am using these famous artists to promote myself. The next person I want to talk about is a friend I very much admire and some-one I have known longer than any of the others. He is not an artist, but a poet. This poet is currently an ordinary clerk at the China Academy of Art's offices, but he is the most talented and knowledgeable poet I have ever seen. I have learned a lot from him, and he has told me a few things that I will never forget. As he says, his writing is like "a tree without its bark, from which some moisture will always ooze." This kind of writing is arduous, because of the emotional energy involved. Today, we see too much writing and art without this emotional investment. He says, “Every time I write, l feel like a used-up tube of toothpaste. Yet, I always feel like I could still get something out.” In addition to his literary knowledge, he has a social conscience. He has call some of his writings "smoke without cooking." In today's sociey, this poet is "a crow and a bandit." He is someone I truly resect, his pen name is Xiao Yao, but I think he may be unknown to most of my readers.

III

I have just talked a lot about my relationships with a few artists, but not really spoken about my personal experiences. The relationship between curators and art is not an issue of identity, nor is it a problem of division of labor. Identity is not important, but the role is. This role is temporary and interchangeable. Curators and artists are temporary roles. I often say that we are all "temporary artists,” “supposed artists,""preparatory artists,”"arriving artists," or more ambitiously, "future artists.”

When I first arrived at this formulation, I was planning the 2010 Shanghai Biennale, called "Rehearsal." In my curatorial essay, I started with "rehearsal is not a theme; it is a method," but my friends in the art world did not believe it and still took it to be an amorphous theme. However, I was very serious that "rehearsal"was not the theme. I borrowed ideas from two films to discuss the idea of a rehearsal.The first was Ingmar Bergman's After the Rehearsal. In this film, all of the important events in the film take place off-screen. It made me think more about what was "off-screen" and what is "later." This made me realize two key element sof rehearsals: absence and repetition. The second film was Federico Fellini's 8 1/2. The end is amazing; the entire cast and crew, whether on stage or off...everyone appeared on the stage. It is a carnival, a festival. What does Fellini want to present in this festival or carnival? From the end of 8 1/2, l learned the other meanings of a rehearsal: gatherings and festivals. Mikhail Bakhtin famously wrote about that raucous carnival, and in ancient Greece, poets and artists were simply people who drew the public into the festival.

Intermission is another state related to rehearsal. When the middle of the play is reached, everyone takes a break, suspending the action both on and off stage. Backstage, the actors are still made up and wearing their costumes, appearing as if they are still in the play, but they smoke, gossip, and have some water. In the seats in front of the stage, the audience can take a nap, send We Chats, go use the restroom, and smoke a cigarette. I am fascinated by the state of intermission. The body is outside the play but the person is still in the same situation; this ambiguously broken state builds a flight of stairs between reality and the stage, and we can follow the stairs up and down. In my view, rehearsal and curating must be placed within this context.

A rehearsal is actually my plan for replacing curatorship. In my view, absence, repetition, gathering, carnival, and intermission are liberated and dynamic. All of the roles are presumed, and everything is flexible. No one is locked into their social identity, and every person can change his or her life. Everyone can imagine another way of living, another method, and another role. In my view, this is the meaning of curating. or the meaning of art itself. So, I called it"rehearsal," or "the art of liberation." In the same way, it echoes the title, a "script for action.”

Why act? We should act to move ourselves and society, which would allow individuals locked into social classes, historical stages, and relationships to show off their lived potential, giving birth to new possibilities for re-imagining themselves and society, and for renewing themselves and society. This is not the art of worship; it is the art of liberation, and curating is a script for turmoil, a script for action. 

The original artical is published in "the Invisible Hand: Curating as Gesture", 2014