TATJANA Artkosmika

CURATORIAL CONTRADICTION - Interview with Dieter Roelstraete
by Tatjana Macic ©

Dieter Roelstraete is a curator at the museum of contemporary art MuHKA in Antwerp, a tutor at Curatorial Training Programme of the arts centre de Appel in Amsterdam and a tutor at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. His curatorial projects include Emotion Pictures, Academy: Learning from Art, and Intertidal - a pioneering survey of contemporary art form Vancouver (MuHKA, 2005-06). He is an editor of Afterall Journal, FR David and of A Prior Magazine. Dieter Roelstraete also curated The Order of Things (MuHKA: 12 September 2008 - 11 January 2009), an exhibition on the uses of the image archives and various other manifestations of a classificatory, encyclopaedic impulse in contemporary art.

TM: You recently curated The Order of Things at MuHKA, with Roy Arden's internet-based archival project The World as Will and Representation, as the initial trigger of the exhibition. In your opinion, how does the usage of found [photographic] footage define the artistic practice of Arden as well as that of many artists whose work you included in the exhibition?

DR: There are many artists working with found footage in my exhibition, and in very different ways too, to produce very different effects: Roy Arden, Cameron Jamie, Luis Jacob, Peter Piller, Richard Prince, Joachim Schmid… In Roy Arden's case, I'd like to refer to something Roy once said with regards to the role of the artist as he sees it: as a caretaker (a curator, in the literal sense of the word: 'curare' is Latin for healing, caring for) in a world that is best defined as an "ecology of images". I'm interested in the slightly moralistic undertones of this statement, which is much more appealing (and relevant, in any case) than a blanket condemnation of the "society of the spectacle". Spectacle is here to stay, and we have to be ready to admit that we enjoy it, that it can be a source of enjoyment and pleasure that is not necessarily "affirmative" in the classic Marcusean sense of the word. What I'm seeing in the work of a lot of artists in this exhibition is that they like images, and feel somehow compelled to 'care' for them (if only by ordering them, sharing them with us in a heightened order of visibility), especially those made by anonymous amateurs who probably have a naïve attachment to the culture of the image - for good reasons. We live in an iconocracy, a world ruled, populated and mediated by images, only a tiny fraction of which are 'artistic' (but a much greater number of which are 'aesthetic') - we might just as well tend to them, care for them, develop a basic form of critical intelligence in dealing with them: they won't go away.

TM: The general relationship between the curator and the artist can be complex, profound, ambiguous… In what sense can a curator make the artist "their own" in terms of Imaginary Property and intellectual appropriation of the artist's aura or social status?

DR: Let's not overestimate the power of the curator to “make an artist their own” - or if that power really exists, let's be cautious (as curators) in exercising it. As a curator, I am interested in artists whom I can have a conversation with, whom I can engage with on a level that is both personal (“connection”) and intellectual. But this is true of people in general - these are not criteria for social engagement that are restricted to my curatorial activities. Hans Peter Feldmann, whose work really should have been in the exhibition, for instance, wasn't interested in having such a conversation - well, then I'm also not interested in working with Hans Peter Feldmann. Of course, not all working relationships between an artist and a curator can (or have to) become friendships, but still - I could quote long passages from Jacques Derrida's Politics of Friendship in defense of this possibility here.

There are a couple of artists in the exhibition whom I've worked with before, some of them on a number of occasions already, and some of them I will most probably continue to work with for many years to come - for a variety of reasons. I guess this makes them “my artists” - but I'm also “their curator”: we're each other's partners in an ongoing dialogue - the type of conversation without which art is simply impossible. (How many art histories are really prolonged and convoluted histories of friendships, partnerships, conversations and collaborations?)

As for the intellectual appropriation of the artist's aura or social status: if you're meaning to say here that curators are really failed or ex-artists who still clamor for the special status conferred upon artists by society… Well, in all honesty, who doesn't want to be an artist?

TM: Which issues, artistic practices or contemporary developments, have you placed at the core of your future curatorial interests, and why?

DR: The great thing about working in the art world is that it affords one the freedom to constantly contradict oneself - to continuously change one's mind, start all over again and do things differently. Because that is really what it comes down to: the commitment to making (a) difference, and this must obviously depart from the readiness to always differ - from oneself first and foremost.

What I'm meaning to say here is that my next few curatorial projects are probably going to be very different from this one - as they should be. The next big exhibition I'm curating, for instance, is not going to include a single photograph - and only one, rather abstract video. This exhibition will be called The Thing and will feature sculptural work first and foremost - three-dimensional material forms whose 'thingness' I consider to be a source of enigmaticalness that enables a slightly mystical experience of art. Very far removed from the realist impulse of The Order of Things, that is. But I'm also working on an exhibition 'about' the historiographic mode in contemporary art that will again have a more 'journalistic' slant - so again more film and photography. I tend to think (right now, at least) that the world is in dire need of art about the world - art that knows it is part of the world, and wishes to comment upon it. Because the world is in bad shape, and we can't afford to feign ignorance any longer. What art can do or should do about this (assuming it is in a position to 'do' things) is terribly unclear of course, but this is what I'd like to think about right now. So clamp down on both the formalism and the inflation of referentiality please! (See? I'm probably contradicting myself already…)