Curration Series # 1 - Christopher Richmond b. 1986

two submissions:

our generation has if nothing else been conceived by curation. with the internet as a tool, ninety-nine percent of all we can readily take credit for is our unquenchable desire and talent for sorting information, as it is now nothing but readily available. for this reason my two submission are curation... the first being some-what obvious, the second, a more focused attention of art curation. the first goes without explanation, so i wont, as it has been explored, critiqued, and questioned to the likes that i wish to add no more banter to the jungle. the second, however, i will go to lengths to discuss in hopes that i will inspire one or two young minds to maybe take a gander.

1) (the obvious) www.wikipedia.org

2) Formless: A User's Guide by Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss

discussion: Formless: A User’s Guide, by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, maps out a third area beyond form and thematic content to interpret modernistic visual arts. As originally suggested by the 20^th Century French philosopher, Georges Bataille, this volume focuses on a third term, “formless,” defined by Bataille himself as a “job.” Conceived as a book to accompany a 1996 exhibition at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, rather than a traditional exhibition catalogue, Formless: A User’s Guide is arranged alphabetically as a dictionary composed of their definitions of “formless” and divided into sections that serve to delineate these concepts rather than the works’ artistic mastery and meanings. In constructing this arbitrary alphabetical arrangement of essays in dictionary form, Bois and Krauss discourage the reader’s comforting tendency to form a coherent linear narrative organization. Re-contextualizing the writings of Bataille and others, Bois and Krauss explore and revise the condition of the modernist art object and its historical trajectory into contemporary art.

Bataille describes the formless as subversive of the traditional duality of form and content. While Bois and Krauss do not define the formless, they do characterize it as horizontal, base materialism, pulse, and entropy, and these terms are defined. The horizontal refers more to a bringing down, both literally and figuratively, than a distinct spatial configuration. Bois and Krauss site Jackson Pollock's drip paintings created on a floor rather than vertically on an easel to exemplify this idea of the horizontal.

To counter idealism, Bois and Krauss introduce what Bataille calls base materialism. According to Bois and Krauss, the notion of informe describes the workings of base materialism. The informe is not a concept and it does not describe a quality. Instead, it is pure destructive action—what confuses the world of meaning and form and its clear-cut differences.

Pulse alludes to the shaking up of a unified visual field. According to Krauss, the various optical theories that fed into the single-minded focus on visual form in modernist art appealed to a notion of the eye as a purely abstract organ, cut off from the bodily pulses to which it is connected. Pulse challenges this relationship that attempts to exclude everything but the axis between the eye and framed forms mounted vertically on the wall.

Entropy signifies the degradation of energy and wearing down of hierarchy and order. Here, Bois and Krauss continue to challenge the ideological effects of Clement Greenberg and Greenbergian narratives of high modernism. Determined to destabilize the constructed and disputable nature of a vast and extremely diverse assortment of historical moments, artworks, and theoretical voices, Bois and Krauss attack the separation and hierarchization of artistic media in this text. Challenging the viewer’s expectations of the experience of coherent, bounded, and unified form that can be organized as distinct media or in terms of a stylistic scheme, the authors explore the act of the viewer on the art object. Through this process, the authors contest the perception of work by revered figures within the modernist, Greenbergian pantheon and discourage the ability to evaluate artists by media. Instead, they discuss how the horizontal, base materialism, pulse, and entropy create a desublimatory act—a contemplative act between the beholder and the art object as an extension of the physical senses. In her concluding essay, Krauss states that, "the formless has its own legacy to fulfill, its own destiny—which is partly that of liberating our thinking."