June 3rd class notes

by cccotton

Notes from our first ‘Curatorial Academy’ meeting

I have to say that I am tired out but utterly thrilled and excited by the first meeting of the curatorial academy. Asher Hartman and Mark Allen were there at 9.50am, and within the next 15 minutes, all six of the participants had arrived and we formed a circle of chairs. The participants are:

Stephanie Kern
Lauren van Gogh
Jessica Crowley
Laura Coplin
David Fenster
Arjuna Neuman

Mark made tea and people joined the circle, got welcomed by the developing circle and just at the point where people were talking in pairs, we went straight into Asher’s psychic reading class, before anyone had any privileged information about anyone else! Asher’s class, which lasted about 2 ½ hours (although I lost all sense of time) was such a great start to this group coming together as a group. There were maybe three meditation based exercises that we did sitting in chairs in a circle, I think they were activating our psychic senses of sound, ‘inner eye’ visualisation and our ‘gut’ . I found the oral meditation the hardest, I automatically wanted to visualise rather than to hear. Then we moved energy around the circle, assessing the different (for me) ‘temperatures’ of energy to our left and right. Asher the asked us to divide into pairs. I sat with Jessica Crowley and we read each other, through our eyes and through our throats. I actually think we were asked to read each other three times but I only remember reading Jessica’s eyes (which are amazing) and her throat. We allowed each other to read each other, I want to do more of this! I liked the protocol of it, asking each other permission to read.

Then we had lunch and moved a table in and pretty much chatted as two ends of a table over nice vegetarian thai food.

After lunch, we each gave our 5 minute introductions to ourselves. I don’t think that I changed the presentation that I gave from that which I had planned before the psychic reading lesson, maybe the way we began didn’t change what others actually said either but I think it changed how we said it and who we thought we were saying it to. We were saying it to a group that had already had communion, and I didn’t sense that any of us was pitching ourselves to the group, just saying where they were coming from. It’s a great, diverse group of interests and starting points.

Then we went around the group and talked about the literature we had all brought, collectively decided that we did want a ‘library’ resource to be at Machine and also consider using the gallery space as a place to drop in and do school work, and also that we would all commit to reading something each week, and writing and presenting a short summary on the text to the group. The reading was as diverse as our presentations and I am excited about both engaging with contemporary art texts that I tend to shy away from and also discovering reading and ideas that are completely new to me and I would never have found by myself.

With the last half hour, Mark and I introduced some of the ideas of ‘curating as…’ that we had prepared the day before. In fact, we really didn’t need the rehearsal and it prompted a number of things for me – firstly, that we are a group and Mark and I performing conversation isn’t going to be necessary (which is great). That the danger of talking about curating in the abstract is that we either take or get given fixed positions in the conversation ( I felt and commented that I did not want to be landed with the ‘traditional curator’ role in the conversations we had going forward). The onus is on Mark and me to use the time this coming week to prepare enough group and splinter group actions that will keep round table dynamics and hypothetics to a minimum.