Curatorial Culture
And so, I was trying to ask the question again, ask it anew,
as if it had not been asked before, because the language of the historian
was not telling me what I needed to know…
– Hortense Spillers
The more possibilities are suggested, the more possibilities exist,
the more possibilities are taken in by the imagination,
the more the imagination’s possibilities are defined,
the more the possibility of more possibilities can be recognised.
The possibilities of more possibilities lead to the imagination itself,
immediately and to me.
– Madeline Gins
If you have curatorial experience, you might be familiar with the moment when something happens in the realm of the exhibition – the moment the exhibition transcends to become more than just the sum of individual art works in a specific space or site. Exhibiting is alchemy. Alchemy of all sorts of consciousness and entities – invisible histories, memories and projections into the future that curators, artists, technicians, installers and the beholders bring in; matters, objects, both animate and inanimate; knowledge, space and environment etc. – which dissolve their boundaries and synchronize to become inseparable and indistinguishable as individual beings. In this sense, the exhibition itself is not simply exteriorized memory or experience, or a collection of art works and their contextualization, but also a specific attentional form, into which social, psychic, collective, and technological instances of un/consciousness are capacitated and merged.
In the age of digital relational technology, attention has become the capital and commodity for generating a new model of economy and culture.1 Following the technological modes encompassed by the interplay of capitalism and the consumer society, every daily act and experience is constantly reframed, formalized and presented as an “event” to be followed and recategorized by computation – it is the eventification of life. Exhibitions are no exception. The circulation of information and the “numeric of attention” on digital platforms have gained great importance, and exhibition-making now strives to implement this technological grammar to optimize and maximize its impact. Therefore, “instagramable” art works, suited to social media platforms, are chosen and placed at the most visible spots as attention grabbers. In such a permeable process of making, eventifying and sharing exhibitions, the exhibition has become a technological object that responds and represents the desires and needs of the digital culture. Exhibition-making becomes more driven by visibility and technological segmentation and less by intellectual effort. Such a hyper mode of attention2 shaped by digital relational technology seems to deform rather than form attention, writes the media theorist Bernard Stiegler, as he describes the two-sided nature of all technology – fostering and destroying.3 Inspired by the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon and his notions of psychic and collective individuations, he poses the question of what kind of cognitive mode is produced as attentional form by these digital relational technologies and how the new scheme of processing shifts the contemporary epistemology on the scale of psychic and collective individuation. His critical examination calls for the importance of attention formed by intergenerational accumulation to counter those technologies, and in his thought, education should carry a social responsibility to take such counteractions, just as art should wake up to its political role in the contemporary hyper-industrial age and pit itself against the proletarianization of sensibility.4 Understanding the exhibition as entangled with various forms of un/consciousness, the following paragraphs adopt the idea that poetry is a technique of transformation and ask what and how different attentional forms and modes can be created in and through a curatorial approach that is driven by poetry.
Critically reflecting modes of attention, it becomes more than clear that time plays an important role. “Time is the very relationship of the subject with the Other”, Emmanuel Levinas writes.5 While Bergson brings the notion of duration to the epistemological exploration of time, Levinas takes an ontological position and addresses how time emerges in the intersection when one relates the self to the world. Referring to previous studies on time, the Japanese philosopher Takashi Uchiyama emphasizes the importance of a timescale of human life, or of what he calls human size in the sustainability and ecology of life.6 Intergenerational education, which forms sustainable attention and is essential for countering the effects of relational technologies, requires time, whereas gathering information by swiping a screen is immediate and always at hand. There is an unreasonable gap between the two with regard to speed. Moreover, in the case of the latter, space and time jump around arbitrarily, so that the action re-translates everything as an “event”. The moment of looking at the screen takes over the sequence of time and sorts it out into a general group called “now”,7 creating an illusionary blur of the chronology of time which makes it less significant. The curatorial is today situated in the middle of such an epistemology, and this jumping chronical order may result in exhibitions of the past not being recognized as originating in the past, whereby they lose their context. But we should not forget that playing with chronology can create other attentional forms in curatorial activities. I would like to come back to this point in a later paragraph.
The Exhibition as Attentional Form and Interface
Any exhibition is constituted by a great amount of attention – attention as energy, care, patience, thoughtfulness, civility, and openness. Exhibition-making is an attention-forming technique – it directs, frames, listens to, and materializes attention. Attention is a specific mode of epistemology making a relation to the specific object or subject and thereby a relation to the world. Etymologically, the notion originates in the Latin word “attendere” – to pay attention (to stretch towards, to heed), in Old French, “atendre” (to attend and to listen), which turns to be “attend – attention” in Middle English (to listen, to look after, to accompany, to assist, to be present).8 In Japanese, attention is written “注意” (in Chinese characters) which literally means to pour out what one has kept in mind – ideas, care, intention, and meaning. The act of “pouring” implies an action and a duration – attention in Japanese requires time and actions to form and reform relations. In this regard, the exhibition is an apparatus to call for attention in duration as well as an interface to generate attention towards a specific attentional form.
Modes of Attention as Methodology
Positioning exhibitions as attention interfaces leads to the idea that the mode of attention plays a crucial role to frame the exhibition. In the fields of art and culture, several techniques to generate attention are cultivated and accumulated – many of them are essentially different from the ones of digital market-driven technologies. One is the Japanese “Mimi o sumasu”, referring to a specific form of listening by centering the body. “Mimi o Sumasu” literally means to tune your ears to the phenomena in the environment and integrate the whole body in the act of listening in order to be attentive ubiquitously in all directions. While the English notion of “attention” describes focusing on a specific point, thing or direction, the Japanese notion implies a spatial time connotation in plural form, thereby fundamentally contradicting the western definition of attention.
One of my recent curatorial projects, the exhibition Listening to the Stones,9 utilized the act of listening in the form of Mimi o Sumasu as the general framework. This exhibition and the accompanying publication represent 22 artists from ten countries in Europe and Southeast Asia dealing with the theme of general ecology. As implied in the title, the project took an aesthetic curatorial position to address the specific attentional form driven by the power of poetics. By doing so, it attempted to become an interface to generate the attentional form and to produce a “mental sketch”10 that reformulates epistemology based on everyday life. Poetry compounds everything beyond any divisions, including time, and does not imprison our thoughts. Instead, it empowers people, because it does not segment and polarize time and the world, thereby enabling us to imagine the past and the future with other ways of connecting our current situation and position.
In the project, the stone is set as a poetic symbol to address a non-hierarchical approach as well as a slow life – an organic entity – to change our imagination of time and expand our attentional form.11 Simondon, who questions the epistemological tradition in philosophy starting from an “individual” to unfold and categorize the world, sees the energetic potential of a system as a key to perceiving and knowing the world.12 According to him, the production of knowledge is always situated in relation and relation-making and attempts to re-formulate the ontological scheme of knowledge in “individuation”, instead of the segmented category of the “individual”. The production of knowledge can then no longer be broken down into its individual elements. In this regard, exhibitions driven by poetry can also be understood as something equivalent to “individuation” that is physically tangible. The American artist Jimmie Durham, one of the participants in the exhibition, writes that stones are the “connections between earth and sky, earth and water, sky and water and earth, sky and water”.13 Expanding the attentional reach in such an artistic and poetic manner, the project aimed at forming a consciousness of our entangled world.
Such an ontological stance towards floating attentions can also be found in the works by Akio Suzuki, a Japanese pioneer of sound art since the 1960s. His works titled “Oto date” constitute a site-specific series that explores natural as well as architectural environments by tuning our ears to pay attention to the soundscape and its qualities, which are also inseparable, such as resonance, echo, vibrations, noise, feedback, oscillation etc. Actively working with the phenomenon of reverberation of everyday objects as his self-made instruments, like a piece of plastic, glass bottles, a stick, a set of stones and so forth, his work encourages us to understand space and spatial relations to the self within the space and within the self. He calls this practice of listening the “very act of listening” that opens the self to space and environment, from which the realm of imagination grows endlessly and sensitively. Suzuki points out the importance of this attentional form, especially in digital culture, in which this kind of sensitivity may be easily confused or lost. Opening our inner and outer perceptions, the very act of listening unveils a technique of shaping an attentional form that ubiquitously floats by sensitizing all as sound to know the world we inhabit.
Another example is a series of radical experiments of attentional forms carried out by the American poet Madeline Gins. In synchronizing with the conceptual art movement that emerged in the 1960s, one of her publications titled WORD RAIN14 uses the various forms of writing – one of the ancient attentional forms – borrowing vocabularies from a wide range of disciplines, for example, medicine, micro-biology, thermodynamics, linguistics, architecture, literature, and so forth, and playfully and imaginatively exploring the possibilities of her text. Calling the book an “atmospheric object”,15 she creatively (ab)uses all literary forms, such as blank spaces, questions, schemas, manuscripts, definitions, brackets, mathematical axioms, quotes etc., and produces echoes between words and associations. With the technique of poetry, Gins blurs the categories of writing – their form, concept, means, and meanings – or even dissolves the broader category of poetry and knowledge, placing everything in one category, the one she calls “the container”. On the last page, she superimposes every word in the book. This uncanny intensity of a blurring, layered alphabet dismisses any meaning, means and order of words, paragraphs and pages, any architecture that generally comprises a text or book. With this last page, Gins demonstrates her denial of any sequence of time in reading, writing and viewing, and shows the symbolic liberation of time in a literal attentional form, which differs from any attentional form defined in the history of philosophy. She visualizes a completely different attentional form to link and attach-detach from the ways of reasoning, arguing and theorizing the world into meaning. While Gins calls the attempt visionary cybernetics, the French philosopher and architectural theorist Jean-Jacques Lecercle describes such a radical poetic praxis as “event-ing text” for “event and invent-ing language” – an “attempt to produce a new language and to think language anew”.16 By thinking language anew, Madeline Gins technically explored other ways of knowing and blurred the boundary between poetry and knowledge. And by blurring the boundary between the two, she even attempted to reformulate the definition of knowledge.
Curatorial Driven by Poetics
Borrowing the notion from Gins, the exhibition can be described as a “container” to let new attentional forms emerge. It embraces the unknown and randomness in order to accept unexpected links that make relations without relations. This curatorial mode is neither formula-based nor solely structured by a pre-given frame drawn from art history or any theory, nor does it develop along the lines of theoretical discourses. It is more like quantum computing, where only the input and output are clearly visibly, with the process running in an almost impenetrable black box that cannot be opened without breaking everything. Such vagueness or ambiguity is, however, essential to any creative process. Clarity does not always make things visible. Rather, it often makes us blind, while ambiguity enables us to see the invisible. Vagueness is a motion of thinking, it vibrates, resonates, echoes, synchronizes, and synthesizes the world to keep making relations and attributions to the flow of energy.
The art work Shinano River Plan by Horikawa Michio – also presented in Listening to the Stones – is another good example of how shifting time and space can create a new energy of attention and make a non-relational relation. On 16 July 1969, the Japanese artist was watching TV in a small town in Niigata in the northern part of Japan and was deeply inspired by the first moon landing by Apollo 11. The historical event made him run to the Shinano River to pick up stones, with which his first mail art was produced. In the middle of the Cold War, Horikawa selected one of the stones and sent it to the American president Richard Nixon as a Christmas gift to show his resistance to the Vietnam War and to promote world peace. Nearly a half century after his political statement, the stone was sent from a gallery in Tokyo to Dresden and presented at the Kunsthaus. The original images of the stone mail art were blown-up, printed and installed on billboards in front of a historical GDR building in Dresden. In March 2022, the images, through the shift in time and space, created a resonating anti-war message from Vietnam to Ukraine. The art work connects the unrelated individual temporalities in the past and expands them through echoes. This trajectory of the stone symbolizes the stickiness of time in the entanglement, from the scientific and technological achievement of the moon landing all the way to different conflicts and wars, and presents its potential of a relationship without relation. Such a time cannot simply be divided, categorized or thematized by geography, history, cultural context, or a specific period in a linear genealogy, like belonging to the (former) East versus the (former) West, to Europe versus Asia, and so forth. It cannot even be localized in the frame of the trans- or cross-disciplinary that has been overused, turned into an instrument, made a discipline itself, and lost its articulation as a critical stance. This vagueness is a relation without relation and carries the potential of becoming a driving force for an expanded attentional reach going beyond the established values and norms – it is about being attentive and staying tuned.
Poetry sticks to a subject and its time, yet it moves dynamically through time and space, producing new intersections of social and psychic attention. Besides the energy and speed of digital technologies, we need another kind of psychological energy and an apparatus of poetics. Poetry enables us to deal with time-space in a fundamentally different way than the imaginary of mathematics and engineering technology – it frees us from the current dominant logic of optimization, the efficiency of relational technology and the calculation and calculus in algorithmic governance.
When we realize that stones are slow life, we become objects, enabling a new form of attention transcending time and space. Without rushing towards clarity by strongly focusing on output production, this psychic attention employs a speed of linking that logic does not, shifting any scale and jumping in time and space, thus bringing the control of time back to the self. The spirit of the poetic curatorial does for the exhibition what Madeline Gins’ “event(-ing)” and “re-invent(ing)” did for her book, it creates a “container” in which the energies can grow. In this regard, an exhibition driven by poetry is similar to Simondon’s “individuation”, it cannot be broken down into segments. Continuous transcendence of attention generates a million points of attention that emerge and become millions and billions by synthesizing and synchronizing in relation to the attention of others. While consisting of an infinite number generated from deep inside, everything is one entanglement in a total epistemology transforming the exhibition into “individuation”. In this sense, an exhibition is becoming “attentions”, “at-tensions” and “attending tensions”.
Observing the theoretical language confronting the speed of digital technologies today, this paper focuses on the idea of exhibitions driven by poetry to “event” and “re-invent” an exhibition. Inspired by Simondon’s notion of “individuation”, it proposes the concept of exhibition as an attention interface and psychic and collective “individuation”. This paper explores a technique to transcend the attentional form to reach other ways of knowing and thinking, thereby creating a practice that redefines us, the environment and our relations to the world. At the same time, there might be the risk of a curatorial mode driven by poetics looking like or being misunderstood as only praising arbitrariness and randomness and lacking contextual understanding or even being ignorant when viewed from the perspective of disciplinary modes of the curatorial. However, in the middle of an epistemological shift it is urgent and utterly crucial to open a new mode of thinking for “individuation”. This is possible only by being boldly experimental and responsive, but of course also by showing responsibility and being attentive to what is happening on a planetary scale. Just as the question of “What is art?” never ceases, one needs to keep asking “What is the curatorial?”. Let us stay awake and think carefully about the possibilities of possibilities.
1 With the analysis of the nature of attention, Davenport and Beck clarify that attention is a link between capital, labour, information and knowledge in a new economy and has become a currency. Davenport, T. H. & Beck, J. C (2001). “The Attention Economy”. In: Ubiquity, Vol. 2001. Issue May 2001.
2 Hayles differentiates attention based on the duration and calls the one shaped by digital technologies “hyper attention” and the one shaped by traditional media, such as books, writings and others, “deep attention”. Hayles, N. K. (2007). “Hyper and deep attention: The generational divide in cognitive modes”. In: Profession, 13, 187-199.
3 Stiegler, B. (2012) “Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon”. In: Culture Machine. Vol. 13, 8.
4 Stiegler, B. (2017). “The Proletarianization of Sensibility”. In: Boundary 2. Vol. 44. no.1 February 2017. Durham: Duke University Press, 5-18. The issue is also discussed in: (2014). Symbolic Misery 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch. Transl. B. Norman. Cambridge: Polity Press. In a more recent article, De Preester responds to Stiegler’s examination of attention and discusses that meditation, which is a traditional discipline of another attentional form, carries the second force of the counteraction against the proletarianization of sensibility. Since it functions as a repetitive practice on a more individual level than education, she sees it as an importance means. This overlaps substantially with the means of art practice as well. In: De Preester, H. (2021). “Life is what you fill your attention with – the war for attention and the role of digital technology in the work of Bernard Stiegler”. In: Phenomenology and Mind, 20, 2021. 102-116.
5 Levinas, E. (1987) Time and the Other. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 39. Levinas continues: “It is not a matter of saying how time is chopped up and parcelled out thanks to the notions we derive from society, how society allows us to make a representation of time. It is not a matter of our idea of time but of time, itself.”
6 Uchiyama states that time always needs another element to be encountered in order to exist as time. In this regard, he considers that time appears when we produce time. In other words, our existence is time. Uchiyama, T. (1993/1995). Twelve Chapters on Time. (title translated by Yoshida) Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
7 Unfortunately, I have lost the source of information, however, a Japanese data scientist made a cognitive experiment to test the sense of time by programming all photos of his life – the images from his birth until the present – to pop up regularly at the corner of his computer screen and observed any changes of perception. His empirical report says that he ends up feeling that all the photos are a present event, no matter how old the images are.
8 Stiegler, op.cit., 1. Stiegler looks into the notion of attention going back to its origin in Latin and writes a concise etymology of the notion of attention in European languages.
9 The exhibition, Listening to the Stone/ Den Steinen zuhören was held from 20.11.2021-6.3. 2022 at the Kunsthaus Dresden, Dresden, Germany. The project was curated by Miya Yoshida in collaboration with the Kunsthaus (Christiane Mennicke Schwarz and Kerstin Flasche). The subsequent publication, both the multi-media digital and printed version, was published in June 2023. The digital catalogue can be found at https://miyayoshida.com/research-topics/listening-to-the-stones/lts-ebook/
10 “Mental sketch” is a term used in the poetry book “Spring and Asura” (1924) by Miyazawa Keji. The poems expand the imagination on the perpetual self, “I”, to addresses various propositions attributed to our imagination in dynamic time-space, starting from an illuminating blue light, an electron on a micro scale, a dot in relation to historical time, data, and to geology in the future.
11 Niemi, M. (2008). “Stone” In: Astrotruckers. London: Harvil Press, 50.
12 Simondon, G. (1968/1989) psychique et collective, Paris: Aubier. (2020) Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
13 Durham, J. (2023). “The Inner Chamber/Die Inneren Kammern”. In: Listening to the Stones. Eds. Yoshida, M., Schwarz, C. M. et al., Dresden: Kunsthaus Dresden, 143-150 (German translation by Karl Hoffmann), 151-157 (English original). First published in Spanish in 2013: “las cámaras”. In: FLOUR, Revista de Cultura Contemporãnea, #7 (07/08/09), 2013, 54-77.
14 Gins, M. (1969). The full title is WORD RAIN or A DISCURSIVE INTRODUCTION TO THE INTIMATE PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS OF G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O IT SAYS. New York: Grossman Publishers.
15 Gamier, M.-D.(2014). “She_is_raining”: a Reading of WORD RAIN (Madeline GINS 1941-2014), 1.
16 Lecercle, J.J. (2010) “Gins and Arakawa, or The Passage to Materialism”. In: Architecture and Philosophy: New Perspectives on the Work of Arakawa & Madeline Gins, Vol. 6 of the Architecture, Technology, Culture series. Eds. Lecercle, J.J. and Kral, F., Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2010, 17-35. The basic principle of visionary cybernetics was continuously explored and developed in the long-term research project The Mechanism of Meanings (1963-1996) in collaboration with Arakawa Shusaku, the Japanese conceptual artist. The project dealt with the theme of onto-epistemology using the means of visual art and architecture.
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Author
Miya Yoshida is a curator, lecturer and cultural practitioner, who lives and works in Berlin. She received her MA in the History of Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London in the UK, PhD in Philosophy in Arts, at Malmö Art Academy, Lund University, Sweden, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany. She has been developing ‘theory and practice’ in various forms and formats based on her artistic research. Her recent curatorial projects include: Listening to the Stones (Kunsthaus Dresden, 2021-22), annual exhibition project, Sharing as Caring No. 1–7 (Heidelberger Kunstverein, 2012–2018, after the butcher, Berlin 2022), Each Line Is A Crime (Archive Kabinett, Berlin, 2018), Amateurism (Heidelberger Kunstverein, 2012), Labour of Love, Revisited: Amateurism in the Age of Digital Net (Arko Art Museum, Seoul, South Korea, 2011) and many others. Her current publications on contemporary art and aesthetics are exemplified in Listening to the Stones (Kunsthaus Dresden, 2023), Towards (Im)Measurability of Art and Life (Archive Books, Berlin 2018), Sharing as Caring No. 1–5 (Heidelberger Kunstverein, 2017) and others.
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