Collaboration

As someone who has had contentious relationships with some of my teachers in the past, I have struggled throughout the education system and I found some refuge in the art department. Even so, sometimes the teaching felt formulaic and you could tell that the departments were stretched thin. Lindsay Smith, who is a photographic artists and facilitator came and spoke at my University about the roles of an being an Artist as an educator. Over 25 years she has worked with a broad range of different organisations to create opportunities for people to be involved in workshops and creative projects inside and outside of the education system. She’s worked a lot with young people and strives to inspire their creativity and knowledge attempting to help them see art as a viable and respectable point of calling. By involving children and young people in projects that are based around galleries and exhibiting, it allows them to see the reality of a profession which is often disregarded in school and can seem quite elusive.

Artistic educators can have such an impact of their students, with ability to stunt or broaden the inspiration of their students. This led me to think about the artist Hans Breder who I came across during my studies. Breder founded the programme for the study of intermedia at the University of Iowa. On his website he states that he ‘conceived of intermedia not as an interdisciplinary fusing of different fields into one, but as a constant collision of concepts and disciplines’. It is a concept I’m drawn to and simultaneously find difficult to wrap my head around. I think because it basis lies in incertitude. Breder believed that the ‘present state of an artist’s critical and creative competency is limited usually to a specialized area’(Breder & Rapaport, 2011) The purpose of his programme was to broaden the students creative, theoretical and performative process by widening their accessibility and ability to connect ideas in an interdisciplinary manner. I think giving students a balance of guidance and freedom to explore and collaborate outside of their chosen medium whether that be through photography, literature, poetry, video, dance, sculpture etc, allows them to engage in thinking and creation that is as broad and ambiguous as life itself.

Links referenced:

https://www.instagram.com/lindseyeleven2/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3245784?seq=5#metadata_info_tab_contents

https://watermark.silverchair.com/pajj_a_00051.pdf?token

The position of photography curator seems to include a variety of different roles, as curator Tim Clark states in an interview with Harry Brook, ‘as a curator you will have to don many hats as creative producer, coordinator, mediator, diplomat, fundraiser, and so on.’ John Baldassari states in his book Seven Days in the Art World, ‘The contemporary art world is a loose network of overlapping subcultures held together’ – much like the art world itself, the lines are often blurred between the roles of those within it. Collecting, assembling and contextualising are just some of the aspects of being a curator. The curator must be finely in tune with the projects ambitions, intentions as well as who the audience is going to be.

In a talk led by curator Mariama Attah, she poses some recurring questions that come up in her process. Who are we curating for? What is the purpose of this? How do you turn a space into a venue? Having worked as a curator at Photoworks and an assistant editor at Foam magazine, she compares the differences between curating IRL projects and editing digital/magazines. Her experience has led her to have an instinctual and confident ability to spot artworks that have real substance and bring them together in coherent collaboration. She speaks on the importance of having strong visual language, “If I’m able to have a conversation with the artist, I should be able to see quite clearly that this is something that is of importance to you, and I think that’s a way of being able to ensure that it will be interesting or of value to other people as well,” She also emphasises the importance of the supporting statement. It must be simply confident and coherent with the work.

Overall Attah see’s the power of photography as a collaborative tool, ‘a medium that enables learning from others when it’s shared’ which plays to why she’s had been successful as a curator. As someone who’s passion lends itself to the voices of the marginalised and un told history, she aspires to bring about opportunities for artists to come together, work with one another and present there visual stories to as many people as possible.

References links:

Curating Photography: An interview with Tim Clark

Industry Insights: Mariama Attah on curation, collaboration, and perseverance

Seven Days in the Art World – John Baldassari

GuessWork

The Artist as an Educator

Curators and collaboration