Recently I had an opportunity to attend an international
conservators’ forum which was held in Delhi’s IGNCA. Conservators from Mexico,
Spain, the United States and so on presented the problems that they face while
going around and ahead with their works. For me, as an Indian it was quite
heartening to listen that they face bureaucratic hurdles and they too have
brainless councillors and politicians who give conservation works to
contractors who in the name of beautifying and conserving either wash down the
patina-ted bronze sculptures with acid or over paint them with black paint. It
is not just an Indian problem. Suddenly came another issue that the
conservators in the public museums face there; the ego of the curators. In the
hierarchy of museum administration, it is generally viewed that curator wields
more power than the conservator. Or at times, the curator him/herself doubles
up as a conservator often challenging the specialization of the conservators.
Luckily in India the competition and the hierarchic disputes within the museums
(and the museum discourse as well) remain as ego issues between ‘officials’ who
carry these designations around, without never flowering into a full-fledged
discourse that would make the museum practices more sophisticated than as they
are today in our country.
(a conservator at work)
What caught my attention was the curator-conservator tussle
that had been irritating the conservators from the foreign countries. It put me
into thinking. In India we do not have so many celebrity conservators as we
treat them as mechanics who mend cars and motorbikes. The kind of reputation
and regard that the vintage car restorers get these days still evades the
Indian conservators who toil with the paintings and sculptures in the dusty
store rooms and workshops of the museums. We do have organizations like INTACH
that does large scale conservations in India and elsewhere. Interestingly, the
name INTACH also reminds one of the institutions like the Archaeological Survey
of India that does very interesting and important excavations in different
parts of India, at times helping in changing our historical views and at other
times paving way for ideological disputes that involves not only scholars but
also ill informed politicians. Unfortunately, like any other excavation agency
in the world, due to the fear of changing the historical discourse which is
conducive for maintaining the history as a given, the ASI is also forced to
suppress many of its findings and interventions in the historical narrative. I
am not scholar to comment on either the practice of conservation in India or
the excavations that have been happening under the aegis of the ASI. However, I
would say, the specialisation that several of our conservators and the
excavators has been underused in our country. When conservation and restoration
together slips over to the practice of authentication of a work of art, it
suddenly enters into a different economic discourse, which takes away the
technical as well as historical nature of the work. This issue has to be
discussed further by the experts in the respective fields.
(Curator Scot Schaffer- all pics for representational purpose only)
My interest here is to discuss the role of the curator in
today’s art discourse. It has become a child’s knowledge that the world curator
comes from the Latin ‘curare’ which means ‘to take care’ or manage. There is
also a saying that the word curator comes from the root ‘cure’ which means
‘helping something out of a bad physical condition’. That’s why Carold Duncan
once observed that a work of art is ‘sick’ in a museum that needs a ‘curator’
to nurse it out of a sick condition. The world curator also has references to
the medical practice of preserving dead bodies. That means whatever art objects
that we see today in a museum are dead bodies because the word museum comes
from the world ‘mausoleum’ which means a place where the dead are preserved.
That means both literally and metaphorically a museum means a house of the
dead. Interestingly, we have contemporary museums where living artists’ works
are also preserved and exhibited. That means, those works that are capable of
reaching to a museum, whether they are the works of a dead master or a modern
contemporary living artist, we could say they are dead bodies. In the economic
circuit of art, which is the auction circuit, it is said that a work of art
becomes economically dead when it reaches a museum. That means museum is the
ultimate space where the dead objects are brought to rest. When a work of art
plays out all its economic values and is transacted in the market, it is a body
in action which needs rest. The death of a work of art is celebrated in the
museum and the curator is the presiding official of that death ritual.
(Inside a mausoleum)
Today, however, both these words, Museum and Curator, have
been taken out of the old discourse and are used for the contemporary purposes.
Museums, moving away from the conventional sense, have become to play the role
of expansive galleries that could afford to showcase high value art objects for
longer durations and in the meanwhile, curators have come out of the old museum
practice and have become itinerant professionals who do not really need
specialization in any particular area of art. Pushing further for contemporary
purposes, the word and designation ‘curator’ has migrated to various areas of
commercial market where utility objects are sold not just for their
functionality but for their aesthetical value. That means today’s curator is
not simply a specialist who ‘takes care of the works of art’ or one who
arranges the works of art. Within the museum as well as gallery parlance, the
word curator till recently had some umbilical relationship with the original
word but that too seems to have severed by the market forces. When the
discretionary status of the word curator is collapsed for accommodating various
practices within its blanket coverage, it has become a word that connotes
someone who arranges a few examples from certain disciplines tastefully,
intelligently and convincingly. This fluidity of position that the word curator
has acquired by now helped not only the gallerists and freelancers to call
themselves curators but also it has helped those people who delves in the
business of life style products and home interiors. (To cite a stray example, recently
I came across a news item in the reputed Hindustan Times newspaper, in which
Gauri Khan, wife of the super star, Shah Rukh Khan has been qualified as the
curator of her life style shop in Mumbai. Interestingly, Sakshi Gallery of
Mumbai had collaborated with Mrs.Khan in showcasing some works of art in her
shop as ‘curatorial efforts’ befitting for the new market realities. I am yet
to know whether such a collaboration has given Mrs.Khan the confidence to use the term
liberally in her business activities or it was just an attribution of an over
enthusiastic journalist).
(Gauri Khan, life style curator)
I am a curator (with a post graduate degree in curatorial
practice from the Goldsmiths College, University of London) who curates very
less number of shows and of late I have been feeling a strong urge to call
myself something else other than a curator in the professional context. The
reason is simple: when everyone in every field is a curator, within the art
sphere it does not make much a difference. We have curated talks, curated
seminars, curated film shows, curated food festivals, curated furniture expos
and so on. (It is just a question of time we have curated medical attendance. I
think the medical packages offered by the high end private medical facilities
in our country are nothing but curated medical packages which for some reason
the doctors are not yet calling them, and themselves curators). We need to find
a different word for this. In the case of music, sampling and arranging were
started long back with the advent of the music and sound softwares. In India,
A.R.Rahman is set to have pioneered this way of music production in mid 1990s
itself. Luckily we have not yet started calling him a music curator but we have
music curators and I have been hearing the name of TM Krishna, the rebellious Carnatic
musician for quite some time and many other previously unheard of names. In a
forth coming art festival Goa, I am told that there are fourteen curators from
different creative disciplines that include the noted singer Shubha Mudgal.
(A.R.Rahman)
If
sampling and arranging could make good audible music, why the same couldn’t
create good art, food, textile, theatre, dance, literature and so on? If that
is true, then curator is a word that has lost its meaning and purpose. The word
curator has become an obsolete word in the contemporary art practices and
expose. This word should be replaced by something like ‘sampler’ or ‘arranger’.
There will be many questions raised at this juncture, of which the main would
be, if museums are still called museums then why can’t the word curator remain
in parlance. This is where the old habits of the market come to take an upper
hand. Market always plays with the familiar and the comfortable. Even if the
product is radically different and new, the advertisements use the age old belief
systems to sell the products. If at all there are locations and events depicted
in the advertisements that are unfamiliar for the consumers for the time being,
the underlying message would be the same as in any conventional belief system;
trust in the family unit, live and die for it. There are several advertisements
that ask women to be bold and more forthcoming in the social life. However, the
point of reference for them would be eventually to confirm with the familial
values.
(DJ)
Hence, even if museums are dead and the curators also have
become an extinct category, the parlance has to remain the same for some more
time and in due course it will migrate to other practices in order to confirm
the patterns of the market, the desire that it creates and its ultimate target,
the family unit. Immediately after the Abstract Expressionist period in 1940s
and 50s in the US there was a short lived movement of photo-realism (not the
same photo realism that resurfaced in 1990s). The critics and writers found it
difficult to find a suitable jargon to qualify the new style of art and due to
this lack they resorted to the previous parlance that was used for writing
about the abstract expressionist works. In this curious mixture we got Zen
Buddhist and oriental spiritual jargons desperately trying to highlight the
concentration and meditation of the artist to make the verisimilitude of an
image. This has just happened in India, in the case of curatorial practice. I
would say, it is time that we rethink on it and call it Art Arranging or Art
Sampling or Art Jokey, Visual Art Jokey or something that would find place in
the art historical and critical discourse of our times.
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