Beyond Orientation

Today, a short number of months since Beyond Orientation and into another year (closer still to the departure of Britain from the EU), I sit at a wooden table (a board, again, as a starting point1) at the edge of London, to reflect on the experiences of this exhibition in Vienna and its relationship to the wider context of the Orientation as Gardening project in all its complex manifestations. To begin, to co-curate is a rich and challenging process; there can be no illusion of one position from which to draw up a list, a singular set of desires, a framed vision that might in itself be proposed as the work of the curator. To curate should always be speculative and to co-curate is necessarily discursive; at the moment the individual believes they hold the framework, the locus, the sense of the collective event, it is always on the edge of being unpicked by another set of questions, theoretical positions, resistances and propositions. In turn, the counter-proposition comes into play, the rebuttal, defiance, and challenge are deployed. This process, of course, could continue ad infinitum, but there comes a point where an openness and empathy to what has previously been resisted, new knowledge and a shift in understanding allow a consensus to be reached and thus, the exhibition framework becomes a shared comprehension. This process might be the result of multiple conversations over several years, something held tentatively awaiting an opportune moment, an intense furious moment of exchange, an idea floated gently between the protagonists. The development of Beyond Orientation was perhaps some/all of these.

I recall a walk through a sloping Baroque garden, talking of gardening as a metaphor for self-cultivation, care, attention, growth, decay and renewal. And clipping here and there. To prune or not to prune; which bud to cut back to, where to let it grow wild. Gardening with its stumbling on melons and falling on grass, its strimming and burning, intends to make space for the human amongst nature’s tender wildness, to make a clearing from which to gaze at the sky, the eye, for pleasure. The sun-baked, raked, crushed stone paths brought to mind power relations - who owns and has access to the land, who does the labour, holds the pleasure? Back to the metaphor’s purpose here, to explore Foucault’s rediscovered ideas on the development of self-knowledge – to take care of yourself. Not in the solipsistic sense, but, as he interrogates in his essay ‘Technologies of the Self’, how the ancients understood the necessity to know yourself through the principle of learning to occupy oneself with oneself before being prepared to occupy oneself with the needs of the group, politics and the city.

Foucault’s text was the first principle of the curatorial premise of Beyond Orientation. The second principle was born out of the wider research project’s developing questions iterated by the context of each event. For me, Rink and Platzek’s work in a Tokyo park stands as an exquisite narrative, through hearsay, the image, poetics, and the diagrammatic. In a sense mythologised, for one weakly resisting the thrall of the idea of Japan (through the Western mythologizing of its culture, object, image, garden, blossom), I imagine their work in that place. How would this manifestation (imagined or otherwise) map onto the urban rural, post-industrial, developments of a wintry northern European city? What could London’s building site hoardings, green spaces, canals, institutions, audiences, offer the Assemblage Boards, and visa versa? From my local perspective the experience of the work here was permissions, access, the trials of Health and Safety, administration, external institutional connections, timetables, delivery and storage. For Rink, once the challenges of installing eight boards across UAL’s Central Saint Martins college building and the wider Kings Cross area were met, the modus operandi was performative through the need to be present with each board, to engage with its materiality as object/subject, to be open to an incidental public audience, to bring an informed itinerant audience to the dispersed sites, and to offer others access to the richness and complexity of the work’s underpinning and evolving research ideas. Rink’s attentiveness to being-in-place as body-object demanded that she was at once alert to her embodied self, the thingness of the board, the material nature of the geographic location whilst remaining open to her audience/other – paradoxically both as meta-presence and self-object-other continuum.

Beyond Orientation’s rationale would necessarily unfold to encompass traces of these experiences (Rink’s research and phenomenological approach and my imagined spaces/pragmatic observations) as the third manifestation of the presentation of the Assemblage Boards. In Vienna the attention, rather than on the board/self, would be towards the boards/collective/works/new locale. The challenge, from my perspective, was that whilst the broader Orientation as Gardening project was unfolding, the artworks by now requested for Beyond Orientation (whether pre-existing or newly proposed) each held their own body of research, knowledge and inherent logic in relation to the original working title ‘Care of the Self’. Beyond Orientation was an invitation to artists who, through the ongoing concerns of their practices, were in various ways engaging with ideas of care of the self/other. In this manner Beyond Orientation carried multiple bodies of research (the practice of each artist) and through these, with Orientation as Gardening, the curatorial platform offered the opportunity to render our territories of enquiry strange. The Boards entered another context on the outskirts of the Viennese city, in and around a parkland pavilion currently home to the Korea Kulturhaus. This third context became a further apparatus through which collaborative configurations offered the contributing artists and the artist/researcher the curiosity that accompanies the works when in dialogue with each other, the not-previously- known. The extent to which the audiences of this space might have recognised these dialogues was necessarily contingent on a variety of modes of access, information sharing, further dialogue and the works themselves. In this sense the inherent logic of each work held sway, whilst the visual (and aural) interrelations between elements were determined primarily through the proximity of each Board to its corresponding artwork as, in this instance, Rink was interested in a process of pairing each work with one of the Assemblage Boards. Spatial arrangements, physical connections, visual references, functional support were variously deployed by Rink in response to her chosen sets of pairings e.g. Ebata’s washed flags were strung out to dry from Board 8, my own concerns with distance and flatness prompted the collapsed state of Board 2, while Board 6 sat afloat the surface of lake Irissee gently drifting with Bannerman’s mildly toxic recycled islands. The structural framework of Orientation as Gardening, with its own set of theoretical propositions, paired in relation to other artworks thus engendered a new set of discourses, some literal, others more obscure but each pairing offering a set of clues, an encouragement to seek out the potential of the object relations and beyond these object/social/architectural relations, and beyond these the object/social/architectural/landscape relations and so on. The self to the political, the individual to the paired to the collective in place.

There are always challenges in the curatorial process: being open to the interrelations and dialogue between things, to allow fluidity and responsiveness whilst at the same time avoiding the works becoming props for, or an illustration of, intellectual enquiry; how to resist the staging of one work to the detriment of another’s visual language, inherent logic, presence; how to avoid the privileging of one work over another? And how to risk an openness that allows for the dynamic process of not knowing?
The root of the word ‘curate’ is to care for (one responsible for the care of souls) to take care of.2 To return to the question of how to take care of yourself, your own work in relation to the process of curation – what does your work need? How might it be accommodated, displayed, experienced? One of the things that we often fail to recognize is that the work, our own work, needs other works, without which it fails to have a platform, a context, a dialogue.

So, beginning by taking care of the self necessarily has to turn to the care for the other. Anthony Huberman, director of The Artist’s Institute New York, writes that ‘Curatorial responsibility involves the invention of ways to appropriately pay tribute to the lives of artworks and artists – not the invention of curatorial methods for their own sake,’3 while Bourriaud4 states that this is the political: paying attention to each other and each other’s work - to consciously undergo the experience of sharing.
On the one hand to curate proposes that there will be a choice, a list, a set of preferences. On the other hand, to co-curate proposes a certain loss of control, a space of response and responsibility to the other. The other might be understood equally as the other artists, the other works and the audience. One’s work in this instance must exist for the other and to be in dialogue with the work of the other – to co-curate, to discuss, argue, resolve, risk, challenge, to collectively construct an experience for the audience as a destabilising action – so that your own work, in some sense, becomes unrecognisable to you. At this point you begin to see things how your audience might see them, as something speculative and strange: you have created a platform for new subjectivities.5 The interrelations that form in the collective spaces of the group exhibition (be it material or social) provide the opportunity for the unexpected to emerge. The spaces themselves are activated by these interrelations, multiple and co-constitutive - always under construction,6 and the contingent event of the reading of this space 7 when audiences comes into play (with all their conflicting and unequal social relations)8. The unexpected arises from the co-operations that come out of the working towards an open-minded space which may be both accessible and challenging for the viewer. As curator Okwui Enwezor poses

‘An exhibition as a space of public discourse, as a stage of anticipatory practices, and as a statement of intent, can no more assert a distance from its cultural context than it can repress the very social conditions that bring it into dialogues with its diverse publics.’9
Geographer Doreen Massey’s idea of the throwntogetherness of place might be helpful here – within this throwntogetherness, negotiation is ‘an invention; there will be a need for judgement, learning, improvisation’ – these rules apply to the curation of a space as much as the rethinking of the city. As the experiences of the works will be layered and plural it we can think of the process of curation as something akin to collage on the city. The non-art location of Beyond Orientation framed by the Pavilion’s porous architecture and the space of the Donau Park beyond inevitably asks how one should respond to the wider context as part of the reading of the works. The Korea Kulturhaus visitors’ perspectives are framed (both inward and outward facing) by its multi-use complex, always in abeyance for the next class, event, music lesson, its brute architectural configurations of concrete, the lake, the little train, the mechanical dinosaur children’s rides with their jaunty sunshades, the Alte Donau’s public bathing shore. Underpinning all this are the histories of the area from the enlightened development of these green public leisure spaces to the land’s previous use as ‘a rubbish dump, a former parade ground that was a notorious site of executions during the Nazi years, and the "Bretteldorf" squatters' settlements’10. How do these multiplicities function as devices for viewing and articulating varied modes of spectatorship?

Toxic histories along with current politics and behaviour seep into the reading of the city and our contemporary climate. We strolled, in conversation about green spaces as care for the working classes, in that Viennese park on the sunny morning of 14th of June 2017, stopped in my tracks as the horror of a burning London tower block unfurled on my mobile phone. Whether it be a carelessness with the poisonous detritus of petroleum by-products and the survival of our planetary home, or our carelessness with our concern for each other. Both are fatal. Returning to the idea of taking care of the self might begin to provoke a return to a more astute vigilance and care for each other, and our co-existence in all our difference, proximity and distance.

Anne Eggebert January 2018



1 Almut Rink’s Assemblage Boards are of course referenced here along with Sarah Ahmed’s ‘Orientations Matter’ in New Materialisms ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost which has been of immense value to my thinking through this project.
2 curate (n.)
late 14c., "spiritual guide," from Medieval Latin curatus "one responsible for the care (of souls)," from Latin curatus, past participle of curare "to take care of" http://www.etymonline.com/inde...
3 Take Care 2011 in Ethics Documents of Contemporary Art ed Walead Beshty 2015

4 Relational Aesthetics 1998 in Participation Documents of Contemporary Art ed Claire Bishop 2006
5 Chantal Mouffe Agonistics Thinking the World Politically Verso 2013

6 Doreen Massey For Space pg 9

7 Bruno Latour

8 Massey

9 ‘The State of Things’ in All The World’s Futures Biennale Arte 2015 exhibition catalogue
10 https://www.wien.gv.at/english/environment/parks/donaupark.html