This is Part III of a three-part investigation by Regina Gleeson into globalisation's impact on art practice. This work was commissioned by the Arts Council of Ireland / An Chomhairle Ealaíon in association with Critical Voices 2003.

The contemporary practice of process in art - engaging in movement and direction rather than in definitive fixed points - has its comfort zones for distance and proximity with the audience. The collaborative practice moves in an "urban and orbital" ¹ loop and engages in a mercurial style of curation, i.e., one that is responsive to the individual circumstance and helps to guide the audience into the same orbit and flow of information as the artist and the surrounding location's references of association. Working with audience communication in mind, local circumstances must be considered if what independent curator Andrew Renton ² refers to as the 'rock-star' status of the curator is to be avoided. This refers to the curator who breezes into town without knowing much about the location, planting an exhibition before moving on to the next anonymous location. Last year both the artist and curator representing the Republic of Ireland at the Venice Biennale were at pains to avoid any such intrusion. In Limerick, the ev+a committee have addressed this issue head-on by bringing their curators to the city well in advance of the selection of work. This enables the curator to get a feel for the global and local specific to Limerick. Without external influence, ev+a could be an exhibition that becomes regionalised and narcissistic. That is not to say that one cannot work without external influence, but it does mean that there needs to be a balance. The curator of visual arts at Project in Dublin, Grant Watson, has spoken of the need for an awareness of this balance between external influence and re-affirmation of one's own status, and it would seem that ev+a  has succeeded in striking a workable balance here.

The important thing is to address what is interesting about artist practice here and to be the centre of your own gravity without feeling the need to have work justified by trends from elsewhere . ³

Also addressing the issue of curation, specific to their locale more so than the 'local', is Visual Leitrim . They have appointed Cliodhna Shaffrey as curator for their art community. While Shaffrey began her work in Leitrim with an awareness of the potential for being perceived as a 'blow-in' unaware of the local art scene, her work grew in a symbiotic manner with the artists in Leitrim through a two-way flow of communication. Allowing curation to become a part of the creative process serves to keep the channels of communication open and boosts ever-increasing circles and cycles of ideas. "You bring artists together and you're shaping something, making it happen." ⁴

In her commissioning and curation of the Republic of Ireland's pavilion at last year's Venice Biennale , Valerie Connor dedicated a great deal of time and energy to finding a harmonious match between location and artist. ⁵  This year she is also curating the Republic's participation at the São Paulo Bienal. Her approach to this representation has been formed around a perceptive understanding of having to represent the cultural climate of one's country with the work of a single artist. O'Connor states that this can create a pressure whereby this single representation is met with an expectation that it symbolises the most important elements in the cultural climate of a country. In São Paulo, she has negotiated a situation in which she was allowed to choose three different entries from four artists who collectively proffer a broad account of the Irish art scene. While stretching the funding is always an issue to be considered, this curatorial decision can only be a positive development for Irish artists and international audiences. Not only does it introduce opportunities for more Irish artists to exhibit at international shows, it also creates an exciting expansion for the curatorial brief to extend itself into collaborations with artists and personnel involved in realising the exhibition. This development will hopefully inspire future curators of Ireland's representations to consider working with groups of Irish artists and participating in the collaborative process by weaving together disparate strands in contemporary production.

Stephen Loughman: Finite , 2004 oil on canvas, 137 x 214 cm; photo John Kelly; courtesy Artworking

2003 was the first year that both Scotland and Wales represented themselves at the pivotal Venice Biennale and they did so with great success, regardless of which terms one chooses to examine success. Next year Northern Ireland will re-affirm its cultural status by doing likewise, and Hugh Mulholland, Director of the Ormeau Baths Gallery, has been appointed the curator. Mulholland has said that he sees this as an opportunity for Northern Ireland to take its worthy place on an international platform, showcasing art that is on a par with contemporary global standards. ⁶ This development introduces the space to dispel international media's pigeon-holing of what constitutes, signifies or defines the Northern Irish cultural identity. It allows the art community of Northern Ireland to show that their psycho-geographical terrain is more than "boom boom" ⁷ . This creates a weight on the shoulders of the curator, because so much attention will be focused on this inaugural event and the curator's engagement will set the tone of the exhibition.

For the past number of years, many of the major international exhibitions around Europe and Asia employed the model of a panel of curators to determine and address the pivotal themes of the exhibitions. Francesco Bonami, last year's head-curator at the fiftieth Venice Biennale , has stated that the reasoning behind the divvying up of the curation was, in some respects, a reaction to the super-star curation of Harold Szeeman, the head curator of the previous show in Venice. Bonami wanted to work in a way that did not propose the curator as the all-important central figure of the event. ⁸ Giancarlo Politi, the driving force behind last year's Prague Biennale , had similar views that led him to appoint a panel of sub-curators. His aspiration was to offer the public a pluralistic view of our society and its composition of mixed cultures. It is not so much that it has become unfashionable to make a single curatorial statement but more that it is appropriate to address a single statement or theme from more than one curator's perspective.

Contemporary curation has a considerable brief: to be able to shift and change in response to the light-sensitive needs of screen-based work, the tactile aesthetic of handmade work, the spatial requirements of installation work, the front-end interface of cyber work, the suitability of back-end manipulations of technology, the potential for obtrusive audio pollution by sound works, site specificity for architectural collaborations, awareness of branding references in design collaborations, access to written work in literary collaborations, accessible time spans for performances; being sensitive to cultural backgrounds without falling into 'multi-cultural blanc-mange', refraining from being too forceful in their interventions and not forceful enough in making a statement or a question. This is by no means a complete list and, considering the reactive nature of the curator's role, contemporary curation can mean any, all or none of the above. The only one constant that re-emerges in curation is the absolute need to be responsive to and become a part of art practice. The most interesting and engaging exhibitions appear to be those in which the curation has commenced in response to a particular frequency in art practice and where it is sensitive to all the nuances and idiosyncrasies that define what is essential to that particular exhibition, collaboration and artwork.

Simon Starling: Installation for weeds (prototype) , part of Scotland's participation at the Venice Biennale , 2003 photo / courtesy the author

Global issues can be unfolded by investigation of the 'small' moment on equal terms with that which is enormous, complicated and intricate. Often times, those wholly unspectacular routines of daily existence reveal some truth about the 'big' issues of today. In a voice-over on Pierre Huyghe's video Analee , astronaut Neil Armstrong remarked that "we want to enter the unknown when the greatest mysteries are right here." In John Byrne's Dublin's Last Supper , the biblical Last Supper is used as a vehicle to address the cultural diversity that is enriching the local community. Sited on Bloom's Lane in Dublin, it is an example of work that addresses the general and the specific and communicates best in a non-art location. It cannot be taken for granted that the contemporary artwork will automatically function in the production-line gallery space. The attention to the 'mysteries' of the everyday means that it can be a complex concern to site the work in a conventional gallery space as its points of reference work against being removed from the outside world. The artwork / collaboration / project has to be able to exist and communicate in the environment of the everyday with the uncouth, unstylised ugliness of the sometimes politically incorrect quotidian. Because much of our reading of a piece of work or an exhibition as a whole depends on how the curator has organised our encounter and interaction with the work, this could very well be what has been called "the age of the curator." ⁹

With the spotlight on curation and its mercurial responses to collaboration within the fluid mode of art practice, is it true to say that the artist of the future is a curator? There is a global trend for the rising profile of the curator, and for many years artists have themselves been curating, so could it also be that the birth of the age of curation is the death of the age of the artist? It creates an unnecessary declaration to say that the metaphorical death of the artist is the metaphorical birth of the curator, but it does draw attention to the fluidity of art practioners' roles. No matter how the roles of artist and curator are negotiated, it is a necessity as opposed to a luxury for both to ask questions; one role relies on the other to express these questions. The terrain of artist and curator naturally overlap in collaborative networks where the artist acts as director of the network and awareness of curatorial concerns inform how the artwork is engineered. However, the obsolescence of the curator would be a disservice to both the public and the artist. There is no need to separate every activity in the process of making art, but to undermine the importance of curation is a regressive step and unduly burdens the artist with the practical work of curation.

Unpopular as the idea might be, the public gets the best access to cultural representation when the artist is free to express their perspective and the curator can focus on attending to the meeting points between art, viewer, central idea, physical and metaphysical locations. The peripheries of both areas overlap; the roots of one role feed the antennae of the other. At worst, curation is itself stunted by the definition of that which it is not, exaggeration of status or undermining of potential rendering it deaf to the small voices in the practice of art process. At its best, contemporary curation enhances the flow of creativity that was uprooted after global dislocation and renegotiation of 'place'.

Summary

In researching these articles on globalisation's impact on art practice a trend has become obvious: that of defining practice through a litany of negative avowals - that which the contemporary artist is not, what the contemporary art practice is not, what the contemporary curator and critic are not. It would seem to be unfashionable, if not misinterpreted as being racist, to discuss positive elements specific to individual cultures. History has provided ample evidence of the devastation of the purist efforts to distil the essence of a culture, and unfortunately but understandably we are scared of cultural categorisation by nationality even though it is avidly interesting to see how people living in the same geographical area inform us about what they see from their perspective by expressing the world that is familiar to them. It appears that we are frightened to make reference to ethnicity or race for fear of being misunderstood as being exclusive. We seem to have difficulty in addressing work around the core of that which is Irish because of the sometimes precarious fluidity of national identity, and even though we like to think that the arts are 'open', there is much hesitation regarding the flux of cultural and geopolitical boundaries. Can we now say that globalisation is a positive or negative force with regard to contemporary art practice? No. The extent of globalisation is too complex to be reduced to a black-and-white equation. What is clear though is that the challenge to the good, the bad and the in-between of globalisation's homeostasis lies in human expression - in culture.

Regina Gleeson  is a writer on art and art and technology.

¹ Phrase snatched from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake
² Andrew Renton curated at the nomadic biennial Manifesta in Rotterdam in 1996. He discussed this idea of 'rock-star' curation at The producers  series at BALTIC in Gateshead, January 2002.
³ Grant Watson, Questions on curation , www.recirca.com/articles/curate/watson
⁴ Laura Godfrey-Isaacs, artist / curator and founder of HOME, an international collaborative arts organisation, in conversation at The producers series at BALTIC in Gateshead, January 2002
⁵ Valerie Connor, Questions on curation , www.recirca.com/articles/curate/connor
⁶ www.sculptors-society.ie/news.html#biennale
⁷ Cliodhna Shaffrey talks about associations of identity, Questions on curation , www.recirca.com/articles/curate/shaffrey
⁸ Bonami, Francesco, I have a dream , catalogue essay for 2003 Venice Biennale
⁹ The idea of the "age of curator" is discussed by Ljiliana Blagojevic in her essay Pavilion Jugoslavia in The Work of Art in the State of Exile , 2003, as an accompaniment to the Serbia and Montenegro pavilion at the Venice Biennale .

The research for this series of articles has been supported by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon as part of the Critical Voices programme, 2003.

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